Just some gems from Karl R Popper

[Tridimity]

Karl R Popper, The Myth of the Framework.

 

'Is my train ticket to London a historical document? Yes and no. If I am accused of murder, the ticket may possibly serve to support an alibi, and so become an important historical document (as in Dorothy Sayers' Five Red Herrings). Nevertheless, I should not advise a historian to start his work by collecting used railway tickets.'

 

I get the mental image of a historian trying to cram all of the world's contents into his home so that he may have available to himself all of the objects that have had any bearing on history.

 

'I remember an occasion when I was chairman of a meeting in which a distinguished scientist presented this view. Science, he said, was just measuring, and correlating results. In the discussion that followed, I suggested that we should ask for a grant for a project of measuring the length, width, thickness, and weight of the books in the British Museum - in order to study possible correlations between these measurements. I predicted that we should be able to find strong positive correlations between the product of the first three measures and the fourth.'

 

'Even the amoeba, we may safely assume, has problems.'

Edited November 9, 2013 by Tridimity