The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
Science is about unravelling nature.
From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.
Nature can always be more complicated than we imagine.
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
The scientist's inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.