Quotes About Discovery

The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say "I don't know"—and then follow up, certainly, with "but maybe I can find out." And work as hard as you can to do that. You may be surprised by how receptive people are to your confession, especially when you come through with the real answer a day or a week later.

The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say "I don't know"—and then follow up, certainly, with "but maybe I can find out." And work as hard as you can to do that.

Steven D. Levitt

When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.

When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years.

It is simply hard to pinpoint exactly when Darwin had the idea, because the idea didn't arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves. In the months before the Malthus reading, we could probably say that Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

We conventionally associate dream inspiration with the creative arts, but the canon of scientific breakthroughs contains many revolutionary ideas that originated in dreams.

Wagner found that after an initial exposure to the numerical test, "sleeping on the problem" more than doubled the test subjects' ability to discover the hidden rule. The mental recombinations of sleep helped them explore the full range of solutions to the puzzle, detecting patterns that they had failed to perceive in their initial training period. The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible.

He drew maps in his head, looking for patterns, looking for clues.

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

CONCAVE LENS (1451)

TERRESTRIAL GLOBE (1492)

EARTH ROTATES AROUND SUN (1514)

CUBIC EQUATIONS AND COMPLEX NUMBERS (1530-1540)

SUPERNOVAS AND COMETS (1572—1577)

PLANETARY MAGNETISM (1600)

TELESCOPE (1600--1610)

ELLIPTICAL ORBITS (1605--1609)

But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original "eureka" moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.)