Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov is giving intellectual dignity to being wrong, but only the right kind of wrong. Not the loud, proud error that refuses correction, but the subtle misstep that still manages to map the terrain. The word "subtle" is doing heavy lifting: it suggests an idea close enough to reality to be testable, generative, and interesting. A crude mistake ends the conversation. A nuanced one starts an investigation.

The line also carries the quiet ethos of mid-century scientific humanism, the worldview that treated knowledge as a self-correcting machine powered by curiosity rather than certainty. Asimov, a scientist and a career explainer, is defending the messy backstage of progress against the polished myth of genius. We tend to celebrate breakthroughs as clean, inevitable revelations; he points to the false starts as the real engine room. Error isn't an embarrassment in this framing, it's a tool.

There's an implied argument here about how inquiry should be organized: institutions, classrooms, and public debates should reward hypotheses that can fail productively. That has bite in a culture that often treats being wrong as moral weakness, especially in public. Asimov is asking for a politics of epistemic humility: judge ideas not only by whether they're correct today, but by whether they force better questions, tighter experiments, clearer definitions.

It works because it flatters rigor without sanctifying certainty. Truth, in Asimov's telling, isn't the opposite of error; it's what error, properly handled, can eventually buy you.