Goodman’s Grue, is about the limitations of induction. Suppose you have two hypotheses, namely “emeralds are green”, and “emeralds are green and will so remain until New Year’s Day 2050, at which point they will all turn blue.” (This can also be expressed by saying that “emeralds are grue”, where “grue” is defined as “green until 2050 and blue thereafter”.) Statistically, both of these hypotheses are equally confirmed by current observations.

— Christopher Michael Langan, The Art of Knowing

…a talk Dijkstra gave at a conference in 1984: “The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”

— Chris Bernhardt, Turing’s Vision

Anything, anything at all can be logical. For something to be logical, it just has to be a valid example of reasoning from some set of premises.

— Mark C. Chu-Carroll, Good Math

If all the world’s economists were stretched end to end—so goes a one-liner usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw—they still would not reach a conclusion.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Max Planck explained it like this in his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” or, more succinctly, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking