But let us remember that we are dealing with infinities and indivisibles both of which transcend our finite understanding, the former on account of their magnitude, the latter because of their smallness.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the limitations of human understanding when it comes to both vastness and minuteness in nature.
Galileo Galilei's quote highlights the challenges faced by humans in comprehending concepts of infinity and indivisibility. He suggests that the enormity of the universe and the intricacies of the smallest particles are beyond our finite capacities to fully grasp, emphasizing the awe and complexity of the natural world.
In practice
During a science lecture discussing the universe's scale, this quote can illustrate the vastness of cosmological phenomena.
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.
Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.
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!
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
The conquest of space is not merely a technological project of interest to a handful of select scientists and specialists, valuable though that research and information may be.
I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.
Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.
Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
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