Title: "Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks: but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house." (Henri Poincare)
The first part of the quote states an idea that most people should know or have at least thought about it, but the second part can be slightly more complex. Science consists of a great deal of factual theories and a house also consists of a stack of orange rectangular bricks but this does not mean that there is science or a house.
Although bricks are the basic essentials of constructing a house, a house is not purely made of bricks. A house will collapse if it is simply made of stacking bricks on top of each other. A successfully constructed house requires a lot of equipments such as doors, nails, wood, something to stick the bricks together and a proper foundation. The same logic applies to science. When one has only knowledge of facts and formulas without any linkage between them, they are quite useless. Obtaining facts for a scientific theory is just the beginning because a lot of steps are needed before a theory can be proven to be true. Science can never be that simple.
The first part of the quote states an idea that most people should know or have at least thought about it, but the second part can be slightly more complex. Science consists of a great deal of factual theories and a house also consists of a stack of orange rectangular bricks but this does not mean that there is science or a house.
Although bricks are the basic essentials of constructing a house, a house is not purely made of bricks. A house will collapse if it is simply made of stacking bricks on top of each other. A successfully constructed house requires a lot of equipments such as doors, nails, wood, something to stick the bricks together and a proper foundation. The same logic applies to science. When one has only knowledge of facts and formulas without any linkage between them, they are quite useless. Obtaining facts for a scientific theory is just the beginning because a lot of steps are needed before a theory can be proven to be true. Science can never be that simple.