Can a skeptic avoid self-contradiction... the Popper paradox? And if he doesn’t, if he preaches but fails to practice intellectual doubt and humility… - John Horgan

Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy. Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions.

Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? ...the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton.

I begin to discern the paradox lurking at the heart of Karl Popper's career... Everyone says this opponent of dogmatism is almost pathologically dogmatic.