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I have two fears in life. The first is a spider laying eggs under my skin. The second is mediocrity. To reduce my risk of mediocrity, I read "Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge", a book that attempts to describe the key factors behind meaningful discoveries. The book was not an easy read, but had some worthwhile anecdotes and quotes which I’m going to share with you. On the whole, science (and I lump in all of STEM) is presented as a creative, human endeavor rather than as an impersonal, logical field as it so often is. Science is not truth, but a description of truth.
Here are some of my favorite bits:
“Syent-Gyӧrgyi once said it’s better to use a big hook and not catch a big fish than to use a little hook and not catch a little fish.”
“Pasteur himself is famous for the statement that ‘in the field of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.’”
“When [Charles Kettering’s] colleagues became too technical, as was all too frequent, he like to respond, Yeah, but have you ever been a piston in a diesel engine?”
“Francis Bacon-said that truth came out of error much more rapidly than it came out of confusion.”
[Quoting William Herschel] “Seeing is in some respect an art, which must be learnt. To make a person see with such a power is nearly the same as if I were asked to make him play one of Handel’s fugues. Many a night have I been practising to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by constant practise.”
[About Fleming] “He’d try anything, apparently, and never take it too seriously.”
“The entire Copenhagen school of physics, which included Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues, has been described as ‘famous for a joy in the contemplation of nature that could lead at times to flippancy.’ One visitor became so annoyed by this lack of respect, he said to Bohr: In your institute nobody takes anything seriously. Bohr replied: That’s quite true, and even applies to what you just said.”
“Poincaré: ‘The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.’”
“Uniformity of training and opinion, along with deference to authority, may therefore be the greatest banes science must face.”
“As George Wald says, ‘it isn’t answers that make a scientist, it’s questions.’”
“As James Watson once commented, ‘It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.’”
“Syent-Gyӧrgyi, another habitual field-changer, understood: ‘If one works for ten or twenty years on something, one needs a change of atmosphere. One gets stale; one doesn’t see things.’”
“A recent study shows that scientists contributing many important ideas to science over several decades of research (‘long-term, high-impact scientists’) usually investigate three or four problems simultaneously, explore others as they crop up, and constantly change the focus of their research.”
“A.V. Hill advised that a motto be put over every laboratory door reading: ‘It is better to work too little than to work too much.’”
[Quoting Santiago Ramón y Cajal] “For scientific work the means are almost nothing, the man very nearly everything.”
“James Watson says outright: ‘If education is too long it’ll probably kill you.’”
“May we, as Richard Feynman exhorted his students to do, all achieve the freedom from responsibility to think and do for ourselves.”
“Kettering once said, ‘I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.’”
“Peter Caruthers, head of theoretical physics at Los Alamos [said] ‘Finally, I realized that if I understood too clearly what I was doing, where I was going, then I probably wasn’t working on anything very interesting.’”
“As Goethe wrote, ‘Man errs so long as he is striving.’”
Corrections? Questions? Comments? I’d love to have your input. Leave a comment, email me at surjan@substack.com, or find me on LinkedIn.
Drawing exercise #22. If you missed it, here’s why I’m learning to draw.