Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it — information is not knowledge. And history is not the past — it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it — a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that. Hilary Mantel
About This Quote

We all know the power of evidence. It’s what allows us to know that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that there is gravity, or that there are planets out there, or that life has existed on this planet for billions of years. But let’s be clear about the word evidence itself. Evidence is arrived at by observation, evaluation, and deduction.

No evidence can prove anything. It can only indicate an association. We have to be careful not to confuse evidence with truth.

The fact that there are stars in the sky means nothing whatsoever about whether those stars are actually suns like our own. Whether there is actual gravity in this room does not imply whether there is actually gravity anywhere else in the universe. The fact that this rock was formed by volcanic action does not tell you what volcanic forces were at work on Mars three million years ago.

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