All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
Interpretation
The essence of scientific inquiry is to approach truth through approximations rather than claiming absolute certainty.
Bertrand Russell's quote emphasizes that the pursuit of scientific knowledge does not yield absolute truths but rather approximations of reality. This understanding encourages humility and open-mindedness in the scientific community, recognizing that as we refine our theories and models, we draw closer to understanding the complexities of the natural world, even if we never achieve complete certainty.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific methodology, one might reference this quote to illustrate the nature of scientific progress.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.
We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.
Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health.
The terrible part of this looming catastrophe is that people have been working on solutions for years and have developed concrete steps to massively reduce our energy use, while stimulating whole new industries and technologies that are more efficient and affordable.
There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?'
We put water down into the earth to push up gas, then we say, 'Ooh, we're having a water crisis.' This is foolishness, and this kind of foolishness, where we try to excuse human behavior, is dangerous.
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