People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
Gordon AllportRead
The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
Interpretation
Scientific inquiry generates questions rather than definitive answers, reflecting our intellectual growth.
This quote by Gordon Allport emphasizes that the essence of scientific pursuit is the continual generation of questions, rather than the accumulation of answers. Intellectual maturity, according to the philosopher mentioned, is characterized by an increasing dissatisfaction with simplistic answers to complex problems, prompting deeper exploration and a relentless search for understanding.
In practice
A speaker at a science conference could use this quote to illustrate the importance of curiosity in research.
People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.
All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.
We consider it vital that the community of nations be drawn together in an orderly, disciplined, rational way to review the history of our global environment, to assess the potential for future climate change, and to develop effective programs.
All of a sudden, space isn't friendly. All of a sudden, it's a place where people can die. . . . Many more people are going to die. But we can't explore space if the requirement is that there be no casualties; we can't do anything if the requirement is that there be no casualties.
I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.
Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.