The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Interpretation
Being a great scientist requires openness to new experiences and a sense of wonder about possibilities.
Ray Bradbury suggests that the best scientists possess a unique approach to their work, characterized by an openness to experience and a romantic view of the world. This perspective allows them to see beyond conventional limitations, embracing creativity and curiosity as essential elements in scientific discovery, which ultimately fuels further innovation and exploration.
In practice
During a science fair presentation, a student might quote Bradbury to emphasize the importance of creativity in scientific research.
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
I never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we canβt imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You donβt stay for nothing.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
To a synthetic chemist, the complex molecules of nature are as beautiful as any of her other creations. The perception of that beauty depends on the understanding of chemical structures and their transformations, and, as with a treasured work of art, deepens as the subject is studied, perhaps even to a level approaching romance.
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down.
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