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.
To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.
The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent.
We should've asked China to be a portion of the space station. We should've worked out ways that we can... just give away the technology that we have that puts things up into space, with cooperation up above the atmosphere that's needed to help each other.
If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
To move forward, what's required is a unified space agenda based on exploration, science, development, commerce, and security.
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