Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
The invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The scientific method is a robust way of understanding the world, relying on critical analysis of ideas.
In this quote, Douglas Adams emphasizes the significance of the scientific method as a fundamental framework for inquiry and validation of ideas. He suggests that science's strength lies in its willingness to subject ideas to rigorous scrutiny, allowing those that endure the challenge to stand, while those that do not are discarded. In contrast, he notes that religion does not follow this same principle of testing and validation.
Themes
ScienceMethodUnderstandingIdeasTruth
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on the significance of scientific progress in society.
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Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
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Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
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What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
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We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
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