Thomas Levenson Quotes & Sayings

As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system. — Thomas Levenson

Science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every — Thomas Levenson

Vulcan is long gone, almost completely forgotten. It may seem today to be merely a curiosity, just another mistake our ancestors made, about which we now know better. But the issue of what to do with failure in science was tricky right at the start of the Scientific Revolution, and it remains so now. We may - we do - know more than the folks back then. But we are not thus somehow immune to the habits of mind, the leaps of imagination, or the capacity for error that they possessed. Vulcan's biography is one of the human capacity to both discover and self-deceive. It offers a glimpse of how hard it is to make sense of the natural world, and how difficult it is for any of us to unlearn the things we think are so, but aren't. — Thomas Levenson

The enterprise of making sense of the material world turns on a key question: what happens when something observed in nature doesn't fit within the established framework of existing human knowledge? — Thomas Levenson