The more he gets, the more he wants; but if he gets too much, he kills, or drowns himself, or goes insane; and there is no cure for insanity. - Henry David Thoreau
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell
To think well, you must think clearly; to think clearly, you must think right; to think right, you must think true; to think true, you must have a correct mental attitude toward life and its problems. These are the four steps in thinking rightly. - William James
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.
- Daniel J Boorstin
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
The most comprehensive measure of our general intellectual level comes from our grasp of the scientific method: the ability to ask questions about nature and logically deduce conclusions from those questions. To illustrate this principle, consider a simple exercise: put a penny on your tongue and hold it there for as long as possible without swallowing it.
Then repeat this procedure with a nickel and a dime before taking it off your tongue completely. Unless you have recently been caught without a penny in your pocket or have had a significant amount of dental work performed, it should be a snap to hold all three coins in place at once without letting them fall into your mouth. If so, you will be demonstrating an understanding of the scientific method: You used one experiment (holding all three coins on your tongue) to deduce conclusions about how things work (coins will not fall into your mouth).
It’s important to note that this exercise relies on deductive reasoning rather than inductive reasoning: You concluded that something was true based on observations that led you to that conclusion (holding all three coins on your tongue). You did not observe that something was true and assume that it was so because you had already observed it (holding all three coins on your tongue). So what does this have to do with improving our understanding of science? Everything! The scientific method can be boiled down almost entirely to one principle: observation leads to observations leads to conclusions—which leads us back to more observations…