Carl Sagan — "Science is a self-correcting process."
Science is a self-correcting process.
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More from Carl Sagan
"The price we pay for the suppression of doubt is that we can never be sure of anything."
"If we are to survive, we must look to the stars."
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made of trees, with flexible parts on which are imprinted many curious squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another hum…"
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
"The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Knowledge doesn't require being right the first time — it requires a process that catches mistakes. Science builds in error correction through peer review, replication, and falsifiability: when evidence contradicts a conclusion, the conclusion changes, not the evidence. Bad studies get caught, fraudulent data gets exposed, and consensus shifts when facts demand it. Unlike ideology or tradition, science improves itself. Being wrong temporarily is acceptable; staying wrong is not.
Relevance to Carl Sagan
Sagan spent his career defending rational inquiry against pseudoscience, astrology, and Cold War fear. As co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and author of The Demon-Haunted World, he argued that science's willingness to abandon wrong ideas is its greatest strength, not a weakness. His SETI research required accepting null results gracefully. Unlike ideologues, Sagan modeled intellectual humility: he publicly revised his own estimates of extraterrestrial civilizations as evidence evolved.
The era
Sagan wrote during an era of deep institutional distrust. The Cold War turned science into a weapon — nuclear bombs, biological research programs, napalm. The 1970s brought New Age movements, astrology's mainstream revival, and UFO cults filling the vacuum left by eroding faith in government. Creationism surged in American schools during the 1980s. Self-correction was Sagan's counter-argument: science earns trust not through authority but through its built-in honesty mechanisms.
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