If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
Kip ThorneRead
As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Being humble is a result of frequently realizing one's errors in the pursuit of truth.
Kip Thorne highlights the importance of humility in the scientific process, emphasizing that true scientists are often faced with the evidence that disproves their previous beliefs. This iterative process of being wrong and learning from those mistakes contributes to a more grounded and open-minded approach to knowledge and discovery.
Themes
HumilityScienceLearningTruthErrorKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on scientific integrity, this quote serves to remind students about the role of errors in scientific advancement.
More from Kip Thorne
All quotes βI think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.
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Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
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'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
Kip ThorneRead
If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably... is being, like, from New York to Australia... what we've achieved so far, in going to the moon, that's about two-and-a-half inches. So that's the challenge.
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A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.
Kip ThorneRead
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Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.
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...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.
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A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
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Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.
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I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.
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If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case.
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