The Meaning of It All

Why repeat all this? Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation. (Location 65)

The next aspect of science is its contents, the things that have been found out. This is the yield. This is the gold. This is the excitement, the pay you get for all the disciplined thinking and hard work. (Location 125)

You do not live in your time unless you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting thing. (Location 129)

The point of Faraday’s lectures was that no matter what you look at, if you look at it closely enough, you are involved in the entire universe. (Location 178)

The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. (Location 196)

A great deal has been made of this by philosophers, who say that words must be defined extremely precisely. Actually, I disagree somewhat with this; I think that extreme precision of definition is often not worthwhile, and sometimes it is not possible—in fact mostly it is not possible, but I will not get into that argument here. (Location 252)