Science Quote by Robert Barany

Science doesn’t advance by being right; it advances by being usefully wrong. Barany’s line is a quiet rebuke to the heroic myth of discovery, where breakthroughs arrive fully formed from a single brilliant mind. Instead, he frames error as a social technology: the “incorrectness and weaknesses” of a theory are not embarrassments to be hidden, but productive friction that forces everyone else to sharpen their questions.

The intent is almost procedural. Barany isn’t romanticizing failure in the modern, motivational-poster way; he’s describing how the scientific community actually behaves when it’s healthy. A flawed model still maps the terrain enough to tell other researchers where the cliffs are. Weaknesses function like handles: they give rival minds something specific to grab, test, and refine. The subtext is that progress depends less on consensus than on disciplined disagreement. A theory’s real value may be in the quality of the objections it provokes.

Context matters here. Barany worked in an era when physiology and neurology were becoming more instrument-driven and experimentally rigorous, and when academic reputations could calcify around pet explanations. Against that backdrop, he’s arguing for a culture that treats critique as an engine, not a personal attack. There’s also a subtle democratization: “other minds” are essential. No single investigator gets to be the final arbiter; the crowd does the hard work of “formulat[ing] the problems more exactly.”

It’s a reminder that precision is often the true discovery, and the path to it is paved with theories that fail loudly enough to teach everyone else what to ask next.