The confusion between science as a cognitive activity and science as a producer of testable predictions leaves science open to the critique of the dominion of technology.

But in science it is not difficult to come up with ideas; it is difficult to come up with workable ideas, to find a way to compose and articulate new ideas as part of a whole that is consistent with the rest of our knowledge, and to convince others that the entire process is reasonable.

Science’s leaps forward are most often not solutions to well-established problems. They come from discovering that the problem was ill posed. This is why it is so hard to make sense of scientific evolution as a well-defined problem.

But the space of thinkable thoughts is infinite, and we have explored only an infinitesimal fraction so far. The world stands before us, waiting to be explored.

Without wishing to diminish the importance of what they have been able to see, I think that they underestimate the cumulative nature of science, which is equally undeniable and plays a critical role, especially in the moments of greatest change. They fail to see that what changes in scientific revolutions is not what could reasonably be expected to

Similarly, Darwin resolved a problem that was not a problem at all in nineteenth-century biology, because his contemporaries were convinced that they already knew the answer.

He succeeded on the basis of the opposite strategy: he assumed the gist of Galileo and Newton’s relativity—namely the equivalence of inertial systems of reference or the fact that velocity is relative—to be correct. At the same time, he assumed Maxwell’s equations and the essential aspect of Maxwell’s theory—namely the existence of physical

Moments of great cultural ferment always correspond with moments of great cultural encounters.

All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity; they give to each other justice and recompense for injustice in conformity with the order of Time.