Ignorance Quotes

“Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting.”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science

“Questions are more relevant than answers”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How it drives science

“George Bernard Shaw, in a toast at a dinner feting Albert Einstein, proclaimed, “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” Isn’t that glorious? Science (and I think this applies to all kinds of research and scholarship) produces ignorance, possibly at a faster rate than it produces knowledge. Science, then, is not like the onion in the often used analogy of stripping away layer after layer to get at some core, central, fundamental truth. Rather it’s like the magic well: no matter how”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science

“In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. The one big fact is that science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it.”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How it drives science

“Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science

“But so soon as I had achieved the entire course of study at the close of which one is usually received into the ranks of the learned, I entirely changed my opinion. For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance. —Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, 1637”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science

“Daniel Wolpert, of Cambridge University, is fond of pointing out that IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer is capable of beating a grand master at the game of chess, but no computer has yet been developed that can move a chess piece from one square to another as well as a 3-year-old child.”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science