Quotes About Discovery

The one thing he didn't do was discover the comet that bears his name.

Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around 'betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could' just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting.

wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But

Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it koagulations viatmin for its role in blood clotting.

He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, "nipple-teeth").

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science.

Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him.

In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle.

A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.

ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old.

You can't go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn't.

When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.

Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.

There's something satisfying, I think," Evans said, "about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it.

there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At

The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore.")

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.

The British molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin, who played a central part in discovering the structure of DNA but suffered from the heavy chauvinism of her male colleagues.

We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise.

a James Croll of Anderson's University in Glasgow. One of the papers, on how variations in Earth's orbit might have precipitated ice ages, was published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1864 and was recognized at once as a work of the highest standard. So there was some surprise, and perhaps just a touch of embarrassment, when it turned out that Croll was not an academic at the university, but a janitor.

The remote valley of Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in Kenya is now one of the world's most productive sites for early human remains

Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system—ever.