One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has bee… - Jacob Bronowski

Todas as modalidades de amostragem fornecem apenas uma informação provável a respeito da população da qual se extraiu a amostra. Ao provar uma teoria científica pela experimentação, procuramos informar-nos sobre um conjunto de ocorrências naturais, por meio de uma amostra, convencendo-nos de que o universo considerado se conforma com as configurações geradas pelo modelo que adotamos, em toda a sua extensão. Muitas asneiras têm sido ditas a respeito da probabilidade na ciência pelos que não compreendem esta concepção. Há filósofos que falam em “teorias prováveis”, e outros chegam a falar como se os fatos pudessem ser prováveis. Os fatos existem ou não

The [eighteenth] century settled down in two camps of Philistines: the literary Philistines and, largely to spite them, the scientific Philistines. It was the beginning of the mistaken opposition between them from which we still suffer.

I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. ...It is... an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into... relevant and... irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment... into a box. ...the moment we do that, we do violence to the connections ...I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. ...I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. ...it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.