Quotes About Discovery

That is often how new ideas come into the world: someone perceives a signal where others would instinctively perceive noise.

VACUUM PUMP (1654)

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

LIGHT SPECTRUM (1665)

MICROORGANISMS (1674--1680)

HOOKE'S LAW (1676)

CALCULUS (1684, 1693)

LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION (1686)

Oscar! You found it! Wow! A flying mitten! Oh, it's only a little bird. I wonder if he stole my mitten to make a snuggly nest. No, he's too small to carry off a mitten. But an eagle could do it! Maybe an eagle took my mitten to keep his baby's head warm.

Oscar, it's getting dark and it's starting to rain. We'll never find that mitten! Come inside, Annie. I made some hot chocolate for us, and I've got a biscuit for Oscar. Look! The rain is melting the snowman. But what's that spot on his chest? Gracious! Your snowman has a heart ! My mitten is the heart of the snowman!

Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What's truer than that...

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go. — E. E. CUMMINGS

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his masterwork, Creativity.

So I'm heading for Truth or Consequences. Aren't we all, says Lorenzo, aren't we all.

Members of this school insist that the only way to find an opening to our underground world is to seek out a quiet and secluded spot. Close your eyes. Concentrate your attention inward. Descend.

Some of the most rewarding scientific pursuits begin with the discovery of a paradox. Nature does not go out of its way to befuddle us, and if some phenomenon seems to make no sense no matter how we look at it, we are probably in ignorance of deep and far-ranging principles.

A second reason is that radical thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all.

And if it goes against common sense, so much the worse for common sense. We don't allow common sense to override scientific discoveries when it comes to the ethology of other species, like spiders or fish, so why should we grant it veto power over discoveries about the ethology of human beings?

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

la falta de atención a los descubrimientos que han transformado la vida para mejor justifica una crítica de nuestra apreciación de la condición humana moderna.

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

at the other end of the shelf, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language is truly a surprising discovery, rich with implications. Even the killjoy has to admit that metaphors were alive in the minds of the original coiners and compelling to the early adopters.