Simplicity is Complicated
I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man’s hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years”. And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced.

Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”, “The Root of all Evil”.

I’m working on a paper for a political philosophy class, and I remembered this quote, which I’m rather affectionate of. (If you’re interested, it’s used to explain the dangers of conviction in one’s logic, like that of the Socialist’s, as opposed to the scientific view of logic (as ever-evolving).