Jacob on Science

“That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.”

“All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"”

“Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.”

“Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world...”

“Science is an attempt to represent the known world as a closed system with a perfect formalism. Scientific discovery is a constant maverick process of breaking out at the ends of the system ... and then hastily closing it. ... The act of the imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. ...every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. ... They introduce new likenesses, whether it is Shakespeare ... or Newton saying that the moon in essence is exactly like a thrown apple.”

“I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. ... It is ... an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into ... relevant and ... irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment ... into a box. ... The moment we do that, we do violence to the connections ... I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. ... I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. ... It is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.”

“In my concept of time, which is largely connected with evolutionary time, the notion that errors are made by nature, that replication is not perfect, is central. ... We must accept the fact that all the imaginative inventions are to some extent errors with respect to the norm. ... But these errors have the peculiar property of being able to sustain themselves, of being able to reproduce themselves. ... More scientific discoveries are wrong than right. Of course, the wrong ones do not get published so often. But never confuse the process of exposition with the process of discovery. ... The discovery is made with tears and sweat (... with a good deal of bad language) by people who are constantly getting the wrong answer. ... So, of course, more bad science is produced than good and and more bad works of art are produced than good ones. The difference is only that most scientists take care not to exhibit their bad work.”