Quotes About Discovery

We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

The world is an empty place if we keep our minds shut! But eyes wide open and the world explodes with wonderment completely at our figertips!

The discovery that I was nothing, that I was responsible for no one, that I was a man of no importance, gave me the joy of a boy on holiday

I understood, for example, that finding one's way in the desert is much easier by night than by day, that the points of reference are numerous and certain. In the years which I spent in the open desert I never once got lost, thanks to the stars. Many times, when searching for a Tuareg camp or a lost weather station, I lost my way because the sun was too high in the sky. But I waited for night and found the road again, guided by the stars.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

You don't get to new places by following established tracks.

Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.

Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful—incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts. Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms. In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined. Twenty

Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.

In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

To ask oneself in general what exists or what is real means only to ask how would you like to use a verb and an adjective; it's a grammatical question, not a question about nature. Nature, for its part, is what it is, and we discover it very gradually. If our grammar and our intuition do not readily adapt to what we discover, well, too bad. We must seek to adapt them.

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without

What Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and many others did was to build upon preexisting theories that synthesized empirical knowledge across vast fields of nature, and to find a way of combining and rethinking them, to improve the general picture.

Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge,1 and the discovery that time is not what we thought it was opens up a thousand questions.

Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful—incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts. Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms. In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined.

The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.54

What counts is not the pen used for writing but the poetry that is written. The reason we take interest in an automobile engine is not because it makes wheels turn; it is because it takes us places that we could not reach by foot. The turning wheels are just the mechanism of an instrument that allows us to journey.

Ten years before understanding that time is slowed down by mass,21 Einstein had realized that it was slowed down by speed.22 The consequence of this discovery for our basic intuitive perception of time is the most devastating of all.