Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
Interpretation
The quote encourages deep exploration and understanding beyond mere facts. It emphasizes the importance of discovering underlying principles and laws.
Ivan Pavlov suggests that simply storing information is insufficient; instead, he advocates for an analytical approach to understand the mechanisms behind the information we encounter. This involves probing deeper into the nature of facts and uncovering the principles and patterns that dictate their behavior, fostering a more profound comprehension of the world.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific methods, this quote can be used to inspire students to think critically.
If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.
From the described experiment it is clear that the mere act of eating, the food even not reaching the stomach, determines the stimulation of the gastric glands.
When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero.
It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread - the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature.
Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
Learn the ABC of science before you try to ascend to its summit.
One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power. One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.
Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
Armstrong described the lunar surface as 'beautiful.' I thought to myself, 'It's not really beautiful. It's magnificent that we're here, but what a desolate place we are visiting.'
It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the "race is for the strong" and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.
Until now the theory of infinite series in general has been very badly grounded. One applies all the operations to infinite series as if they were finite; but is that permissible? I think not. Where is it demonstrated that one obtains the differential of an infinite series by taking the differential of each term? Nothing is easier than to give instances where this is not so.
Spacewalking trumps everything. Viscerally, it is a phenomenal place to be; to be able to glance right and see the world, glance left and see the universe, and realise for a moment that you're holding on to your known existence with one hand. That's the thing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.