"[...] the most interesting feature of this science astronomy (and of all science) is our eager ignorance." (Shapley Harlow, "Astronomy", Scientific American Vol. 183 (3), 1950)
"The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought." (Alan W Watts, "The Wisdom of Insecurity", 1951)
"We are not today tempted to search for these keys that unlock the whole of human knowledge and man’s experience. We know that we are ignorant; we are well taught it, and the more surely and deeply we know our own job the better able we are to appreciate the full measure of our pervasive ignorance." (J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)
"What the world needs is a fusion of the sciences and the humanities. The humanities express the symbolic, poetic, and prophetic qualities of the human spirit. Without them we would not be conscious of our history; we would lose our aspirations and the grace of expression that move men’s hearts. The sciences express the creative urge in man to construct a universe which is comprehensible in terms of the human intellect. Without them, mankind would find itself bewildered in a world of natural forces beyond comprehension, victims of ignorance, superstition and fear." (Isidor I Rabi, [address] 1954)
"Ignorance of the significance of facts renders us as blind to the solution of a problem as if we were matching colors in the dark." (Edward Hodnett, "The Art of Problem Solving" Part I, 1955)
"Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos’, ‘accidental’, ‘chance’, ‘unpredictable’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance." (Harlow Shapley, "Of Stars and Men: Human Response to an Expanding Universe", 1958)
"The precise specification of our knowledge is, however, the same as the precise specification of our ignorance." (Sir Ronald A Fisher, Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference, 1959)
"First, I should be clear about what the act of discovery entails. It is rarely, on the frontier of knowledge or elsewhere, that new facts are 'discovered' in the sense of being encountered, as Newton suggested, in the form of islands of truth in an uncharted sea of ignorance. Or if they appear to be discovered in this way, it is almost always thanks to some happy hypothesis about where to navigate. Discovery, like surprise, favors the well-prepared mind." (Jerome S Bruner, "On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand", 1962)
"An observer of our biological sciences today sees dark figures moving over a bridge of glass. We are faced with an ever expanding universe of light and darkness. The greater the circle of understanding becomes, the greater is the circumference of surrounding ignorance." (Erwin Chargaff, "Essays on Nucleic Acids", 1963)
"The problem of error has preoccupied philosophers since the earliest antiquity. According to the subtle remark made by a famous Greek philosopher, the man who makes a mistake is twice ignorant, for he does not know the correct answer, and he does not know that he does not know it." (Félix Borel, "Probability and Certainty", 1963)
"[…] in the statistical world you can multiply ignorance by a constant and get truth." (Raymond F Jones, "The Non-Statistical Man", 1964)
"Scientists seem able to go about their business in a state of indifference to, if not ignorance of, anything but the going, currently acceptable doctrine of their several disciplines." (Eric Larrabee, "Commentary Science and the Common Reader", 1966)
"Primary scientific papers are not meant to be final statement of indisputable truths; each is merely a tiny tentative step forward, through the jungle of ignorance." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Information, Communication, Knowledge", Nature Vol. 224 (5217), 1969)
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