Most Important Concepts

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.
All evils are due to insufficient knowledge.

Action Points

Argument that all human progress has resulted from a single human activity: a quest for good explanations.

Scientific theories are not derived from anything, they are guesses.
In reality the future is unlike the past. Science often brings with it experiences that have never been observed before in the past, based on predictions.
No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.
Fallibilism, or the idea that no authority has a final say on what is true, being aware that even our best theories have parts in them that are based on false truths, is essential for the beginning of infinity.
We perceive nothing as what it really is.
A tradition of criticism is crucial for scientific progress, to weed out bad explanations.
Some explanations have enormous reach, explaining much more than what they were originally designed to.

Scientific instruments bring us closer to reality, even when in purely physical terms they only ever separate us further from it.
- E.g. Looking directly at the stars there is only some air in between your eyes and the stars. With telescopes, mirrors, cameras, optical enhancers, & digital screens, you are further physically but can observe reality better.
In a way, our senses are also only just instruments, the observation of reality still only happens in our minds. Senses just help us make a better approximate

We call a phenomena significant if parochial theories are inadequate to explain it, or if it appears in the explanation of many other phenomena.