"... there is this possibility:
after I tell you something, you just can't believe it. You can't accept it. You don't like it. ...
It's a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: They've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment.
It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense."
QED by
Richard Feynman
Page 10
"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
My emphasis - ed.
"Cargo Cult Science", by Richard Feynman
included in 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!':
Adventures of a Curious Character, page 308
or online here or
here
attributed to Galileo
"Russell's interest in the Psychology is demonstrated by the great number of marginalia in his copy."
"I am persuaded that Russell and Dewey had no fundamental disagreement about truth, but only different ways of talking about it."
The Night Is Large :
Collected Essays 1938-1995
by Martin Gardner
, page 471
Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener
by Martin Gardner
"There are not two kinds of medicine, one conventional and the other unconventional .... In the best kind of medical practice, all proposed treatments must be tested objectively. In the end, there will only be treatments that pass that test and those that do not, those that are proven worthwhile and those that are not. Can there be any reasonable "alternative"?"
"Medicine is not perfect. But it has not claimed to be perfect. It is at present further ahead than it has ever been. I'm alive because of it, being rescued from extinction on more than one occasion. Any system has 'innumerable shortcomings'. That's the nature of knowledge, science, and technology. No one should be surprised that medicine is still learning and discovering."
Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed.
V 14,
p 400. "Macropedia" entry on "Augustine"
-- Sounds like
Voltaire ...
And questions of Catholic doctrine and orthodoxy aside,
what is believed everywhere, always, and by all people?
"The dotcom boom has gone bust. ...
What happened is no great mystery. Hype had triumphed over reason for long enough, and finally reason came back to kick hype in the ass."
This essay discuss the best current understanding of the relationship between mathematical and empirical knowledge.
It focuses on two questions:
- Does mathematics have some sort of deep metaphysical connection with reality,
and
- if not, why is it that mathematical abstractions seem so often to be so powerfully predictive in the real world?