"For the modern counterparts of Gödel and Turing - the likes of Roger Penrose and Gregory Chaitin - intellectual certainty is a dead end. Serious thinkers are not afraid of uncertainty. For them a theory's uncertainty or incompleteness is not a failing but a positive and creative condition in its own right. The profound discoveries of modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish only in the liminal and fertile land that lies between too much certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to tack back and forth between the two." "Thinking flourishes in the land between certainty and doubt" "More than ever, science needs to remember the words of Bertrand Russell: "Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales... To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing.""

From issue 2615 of New Scientist magazine, 04 August 2007, page 46-47