The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”
— Carlo Rovelli · Science
The World Motivation
The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”
— Carlo Rovelli · Science
Explore more quotes by Carlo Rovelli on topics like Science, wisdom, and life lessons.
“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”
“There is no single time: there is a different duration for every trajectory; and time passes at different rhythms according to place and speed. It is not directional; the difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary euqations of the world; its oritentation is merely a contigent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details. In this blurred view, the past of the universe was in a curioysly “particular” state. The notion of the “present” does not work; in the vast universe there is nothing that we can resonably call “present”. The substratum that determines the duration of time is not an independent entity, different from the others that make up the world; it is an aspect of a dynamic field. It jumps, fluactuates, materializies only by interacting, and is not to be found beneath a minimum scale.”
“As vivid as it may appear to us, our experience of the passage of time does not need to reflect a fundamental aspect of reality.”
“Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.”
“I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.”
“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”
“NeuroFlex ACT is rooted in the neurodiversity paradigm. It sees your brain not as a problem to be solved, but as a unique ecosystem to be understood, respected, and supported.”
“It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.”
“Don’t ask what is allowed — ask what if it were true.”
“People associate science with absolutes that are immutable, when in fact science is a process that continually uncovers new information. As new information evolves, the process of science allows for self-correction. The biological or health sciences are different from the physical sciences and mathematics. With mathematics, two plus two equals four today, and two plus two will equal four a thousand years from now. Not so with the biological sciences, where what we know continues to evolve and uncertainty is common. This uncertainty is magnified in the context of a deadly pandemic when there is already anxiety and suffering. With COVID, our understanding of transmissibility, severity, vulnerability of different people, and level of protection, to name a few, continually evolved, and our medical advice had to change to reflect this.”