There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the typical skepticism surrounding new scientific discoveries and the tendency to overlook or misattribute those who made them.
Bill Bryson's quote succinctly captures the common trajectory of scientific discovery: initial disbelief, followed by a dismissal of its significance, and finally a misattribution of credit. This reflects not only the challenges faced by innovators in being recognized for their contributions but also the societal tendency to resist change and to acknowledge new ideas only after they gain acceptance, often crediting the wrong individuals in the process.
In practice
During a presentation on the history of scientific breakthroughs, this quote could illustrate how many discoveries were initially dismissed.
For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose
Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.
Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.
If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.
Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.
Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.
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