Quote of the day

From Lawrence Krauss, in a discussion with Natalie Jeremijenko that is featured in the latest issue of Seed:

I think that's what makes science special. As a scientist and someone who tries, for better or worse, to extol the virtues of science in a society that doesn't appreciate many of those virtues, I think that ultimately the good stuff wins out even if it takes a while to do it. Because the final arbiter of success isn't people. In science, it's experiments. It's the ability to make it work. If it works, then people buy into it, whether they like it or not. And I really think that's profoundly important. That, and the oft-misunderstood fact that science doesn't prove things to be true. Science only proves things to be false. That's all it does. But that alone is something that doesn't happen in almost any other area of human activity. The fact that you can say, "That's garbage, don't talk about it any more." The earth isn't flat. We don't need to have critical thinking classes to debate or discuss it. You just go around it, end of story. And the ability to throw out ideas that aren't productive is, to me, what makes science unique and what allows for progress. You don't have to keep wasting your time on the wrong things, because the wrong things are obvious. The right things may not be obvious, but the wrong things should be. And if I could just convince people of that, I think it would go a long way to getting people to have a perspective of science that is useful.