Quotes on Scientific Discovery

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.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.

The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.

I had fallen in love with a young man... and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.

In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity — and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.

If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case.

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.

[A]ll knowledge is one. When a light brightens and illuminates a corner of a room, it adds to the general illumination of the entire room. Over and over again, scientific discoveries have provided answers to problems that had no apparent connection with the phenomena that gave rise to the discovery.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Scientific discovery may not be better than sex, but the satisfaction lasts longer.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

By observing natural scientific discoveries through a perception deepened by meditation, we can develop a new awareness of reality. This awareness could become the bedrock of a spirituality that is not based on the dogmas of a given religion, but on insights into a higher and deeper meaning. I am referring to the ability to recognize, to read, and to understand the firsthand revelations.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.