I’ve been a reg­is­tered dietit­ian for a few years now, long enough to observe lots of evo­lu­tion in nutri­tion sci­ence. Nuts and avo­ca­dos went from bad, espe­cial­ly for weight loss, to good. Cheese appears to be tran­si­tion­ing from some­times and only in mod­er­a­tion to maybe okay. Same sto­ry with whole milk, whole milk yogurt, and lean beef, to name just a few. But that’s the nature of sci­ence — it evolves as tools become more sophis­ti­cat­ed and lines of ques­tion­ing deep­en. A lot of folks don’t under­stand that and assume that sci­en­tists don’t know what they’re talk­ing about because they keep chang­ing their minds. Super­im­pose our cur­rent cul­ture where beliefs trump sci­ence, and sci­ence takes a seri­ous beat­ing.

I was remind­ed of the nature of the sci­en­tif­ic process while read­ing a book cho­sen by my book club, “Last Days of Night” by Gra­ham Moore. The book tells the charm­ing fic­tion­al­ized his­to­ry of the rela­tion­ships among Thomas Edi­son, George West­ing­house, Niko­la Tes­la, and attor­ney Paul Cra­vath in the late 1800s. In addi­tion to the sto­ry, I’ve par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed read­ing the chap­ter open­er quotes that are cred­it­ed to his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. Many per­tain to the sci­en­tif­ic process, and I thought I would share them here:

  • “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thou­sand ways that don’t work.” Thomas Edi­son
  • “Just because some­thing does­n’t do what you planned it to do does­n’t mean it’s use­less.” Thomas Edi­son
  • “When you have exhaust­ed all pos­si­bil­i­ties, remem­ber this–you haven’t.” Thomas Edi­son
  • “Sci­ence may be described as the art of sys­tem­at­ic oversimplification–the art of dis­cern­ing what we may with advan­tage omit.” Karl Pop­per
  • “Always remem­ber that it is impos­si­ble to speak in such a way that you can­not be mis­un­der­stood: There will always be some who mis­un­der­stand you.” Karl Pop­per
  • “No mat­ter how many instances of white swans we have observed, that does not jus­ti­fy the infer­ence that all swans are white.” Karl Pop­per
  • “When­ev­er a the­o­ry appears to you as the only pos­si­ble one, take this as a sign that you have nei­ther under­stood the the­o­ry nor the prob­lem which it was intend­ed to solve.” Karl Pop­per
  • “A sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tion is not ful­ly reducible to a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of … sta­ble data. In the first place, the data are not unequiv­o­cal­ly sta­ble.” Thomas Kuhn
  • “Sci­ence sel­dom pro­ceeds in the straight­for­ward, log­i­cal man­ner imag­ined by out­siders.” James Wat­son
  • “What is a sci­en­tist after all? It is a curi­ous man look­ing through a key­hole, the key­hole of nature, try­ing to know what is going on.” Jacques Cousteau
  • “At the heart of sci­ence is an essen­tial bal­ance between two seem­ing­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry attitudes–an open­ness to new ideas, no mat­ter how bizarre or coun­ter­in­tu­itive they may be, and the most ruth­less skep­ti­cal scruti­ny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are win­nowed from deep non­sense.” Carl Sagan
  • “Head­lines, in a way, are what mis­lead you, because bad news is a head­line, and grad­ual improve­ment is not.” Bill Gates
  • “If you real­ly look close­ly, most overnight suc­cess­es took a long time.” Steve Jobs
  • “The good thing about sci­ence is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Neil deGrasse Tyson