Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.
Interpretation
Scientific progress often comes from focusing on relevant information while disregarding the irrelevant.
Galileo Galilei's quote highlights the essence of scientific inquiry, suggesting that the advancement of knowledge often relies more on the ability to discard unnecessary information than on accumulating facts. This perspective encourages scientists and thinkers to hone their focus, directing their efforts toward what truly matters in their studies, rather than getting lost in trivial details that do not contribute to understanding.
In practice
In a speech about scientific methods, one might quote Galileo to emphasize the importance of focusing on essential data.
It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.
We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!
To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.
Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
Physicists analyse systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.