Quotes About Discovery

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

The most beautiful thing we can experience,' he said, 'is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

One of the great virtues of science is that scientists know when they don't know the answer to something. They cheerfully admit that they don't know. Cheerfully, because not knowing the answer is an exciting challenge to try to find it.

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.

Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.

The whole purpose of our search for a 'unit of selection' is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose.

We don't have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.

Unweaving the Rainbow

on page 96 of my hero Peter Medawar's book The Limits of Science: 'I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God.

There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them.

It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.

We can't prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.

mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy

Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.

EÄŸer bilim tarihi bize tek bir ÅŸey gösteriyorsa, o da cehaletimize 'Tanr?' etiketini yap??t?rarak bir yere ulaÅŸamad???m?zd?r.

There is real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

This 'shuddering before the beautiful', this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound. S. Chandrashekhar , physicist, cited by Richard Dawkins

We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bound or inhabited by dragons.

In 1846, two mathematical astronomers, J. C. Adams in England and U. J. J. Leverrier in France, were independently puzzled by a discrepancy between the actual position of the planet Uranus and where it theoretically should have been. Both calculated that the perturbation could have been caused by the gravity of an invisible planet of a particular mass in a particular place. The German astronomer J. G. Galle duly pointed his telescope in the right direction and discovered Neptune.

I pity the people who don't like to read, because then they spend their whole lives stuck in this one world and dont get to discover any others.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.

He was… a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong

They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. Beneath