Jim Peebles Quotes

I don't think that science is complete at all. We don't understand everything, and one can see, within science itself, there are many inconsistencies. We just have to accept that we don't understand.

The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, 'You haven't answered every question with evolution,'... Well, guess what? Science can't answer every question.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.

And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.

It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.

I don't have all the answers.

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.

Heisenberg, Max Plank and Einstein, they all agreed that science could not solve the mystery of the universe.

There is no complete theory of anything.

Scientists tend to build a reputation on refuting the theories of those who have gone before. Yet, whatever we hypothesize, observe, measure or record about the natural world, it leaves more unanswered questions.

All that we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

As a number of people have stressed over the years, I think it would be premature to assume science itself will explain everything.

The reality is, there's still so much we haven't yet figured out. There's still so much stuff that has not been made more, frankly, efficient.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

Scientists tend to focus on what they don't know more than what they do know. And there are a lot of things we still don't know about the climate. But we know the difference between climate variability and climate change, and right now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is well outside the variability pattern - and that's quite quantifiable.

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

I feel that I've often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain. Why the universe is accelerating in its expansion and what came before the Big Bang serve as compelling examples. The process of science provides a way to seek answers to those questions.

As long as we do science, some things will always remain unexplained.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

In real science a hypothesis can never be proved true...A science which confines itself to correlating phenomena can never learn anything about the reality underlying the phenomena, while a science which goes further than this and introduces hypotheses about reality, can never acquire certain knowledge of a positive kind about reality; in whatever way we proceed, this is forever denied us.

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

The natural scientist is concerned with a particular kind of phenomena ... he has to confine himself to that which is reproducible ... I do not claim that the reproducible by itself is more important than the unique. But I do claim that the unique exceeds the treatment by scientific method. Indeed it is the aim of this method to find and test natural laws.

All scientists should be skeptics. The reason why is that, even with the best of scientific measurements, we can come up with all kinds of explanations of what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect, and yet most of those explanations are wrong. It's really easy to be wrong in science ... it's really hard to be right.