Quote of the Day (Heinz Pagels)

Quote of the Day (Heinz Pagels) December 4, 2008

“The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.”

Heinz Pagels, Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985; as quoted by Chet Raymo)

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