Lewis Thomas

We’re as clever as we think we are, but we’ll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We’re at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time – there’s no reason why we can’t do it in other endeavors.

Very few recognize science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever taken by human beings, the chance to glimpse things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works.

Much of today’s public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.

I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.