Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought”, “a priori givens”, etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason. Albert Einstein
About This Quote

Albert Einstein was referring to the fact that, in science, what is often taken for granted often turns out to have been based on a mistake. Scientists try to base their theories on facts and experiments, but they can be proven wrong. In this quote, Einstein is saying that if we are not careful, we can accept facts and ideas without questioning them. In science, facts are tested and new facts are discovered.

However, in some cases, facts have been accepted even though they were based on a mistake or had been proven wrong. The big lesson of this quote is that we must question our assumptions and look beyond the obvious.

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