Matīss Apinis

“Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“[E]ven laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined – inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light – where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark