31 January 2007

From the book by KC Cole

There were some really significant insights into the nature of science in the book "First You Build A Cloud" that I really liked. Here are a few:

"Right ideas are seeds that flower into righter ideas, whereas wrong ideas are often sterile and do not bear fruit. Once Newton got the right idea about gravity, he explained a great deal more than falling apples, or even the orbit of the moon. He tied together the universe with one cosmic force in a way that allowed later astronomers to understand the motions and masses of all the stars and planets." KC Cole when speaking about the rightness or wrongness of an idea in science.

"In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations." Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics

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