Selected discovery quotes

1. There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

2. What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field.

3. All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I'm gone, I trust you will notice the river.

4. The most exciting place to discover talent is in yourself.

5. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

6. There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

7. They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

8. Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

9. We've discovered the secret of life.

10. The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of the half a century of intense research that followed, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story.

11. Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

12. Here before us was sufficient evidence to show that it really was an entrance to a tomb, and by the seals, to all outward appearances that it was intact.

13. Though I was satisfied that I was on the verge of perhaps a magnificent find, probably one of the missing tombs that I had been seeking for many years, I was much puzzled by the smallness of the opening in comparison with those of other royal tombs in the valley.

14. The news of the discovery spread fast all over the country, and inquisitive enquiries mingled with congratulations from this moment became the daily programme.

15. As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal.

16. I would think Until I found Something I can never find; - Something Lying On the ground, In the bottom Of my mind.

17. I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

18. Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

19. There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a fair pearl laid up in the bosom of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be.

20. Nowadays, cosmology seems rather unexciting.

21. Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

22. We certainly don't yet know all the answers. But the universe is about to be pried open.

23. Secrets of the cosmos will begin to unravel. I, for one, can't wait.

24. Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

25. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

26. I looked for perfection, and I found something better.

27. [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.

28. It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.

29. To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

30. The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.

31. The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and - yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible.

32. If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

33. The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

34. I don't invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions: Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them.

35. The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

36. Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical - and maybe even experimental - grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.

37. Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt; Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.

38. We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

39. We often discover what WILL do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

40. The goal of mankind is knowledge. . . . Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man 'knows,' should, in strict psychological language, be what he 'discovers' or 'unveils'; what man 'learns' is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

41. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.

42. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem -- Fermat's Last Theorem.

43. If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.

44. When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you never forget it.

45. We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there's a part of us that wants - that needs - to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler's checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for 'transfusion,' and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to french-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.

46. Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry. I who don't know the secret wrote the line.

47. We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

48. It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.

49. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene.

50. One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.

51. To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures. (p. 36)

52. My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It's a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that's one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature.

53. In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that? It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

54. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. (p.92)

55. Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have actually been effected?

56. There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.

57. I had made up my mind to find that for which I was searching even if it required the remainder of my life. After innumerable failures I finally uncovered the principle for which I was searching, and I was astounded at its simplicity. I was still more astounded to discover the principle I had revealed not only beneficial in the construction of a mechanical hearing aid but it served as well as means of sending the sound of the voice over a wire. Another discovery which came out of my investigation was the fact that when a man gives his order to produce a definite result and stands by that order it seems to have the effect of giving him what might be termed a second sight which enables him to see right through ordinary problems. What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

58. After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight

59. What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.

60. There is a place with four suns in the sky - red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth - and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.

61. I came into the room which was half-dark and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience, and realised that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the Earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me. Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the Earth, provided no new source [of heat] was discovered. That prophetic utterance referred to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy beamed upon me.

62. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

63. When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders. ~ 37

64. There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. In my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don't work, so I have to give it up

65. You know, without my telling you, how sometimes A word or name eludes you, and you seek it Through running ghosts of shadow,-leaping at it, Lying in wait for it to spring upon it, Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, You hear it, see it flash among the branches, And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it- Well, it was so I followed down this music, Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry, Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted, Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars-

66. Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

67. With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner... widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in... at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker. Presently, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously 'Can you see anything?', it was all I could do to get out the words 'Yes, wonderful things'.

68. The deeper the search in the mine of truth, the richer the discovery of gems buried here in the shape of openings for an ever greater variety of services.

69. The most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world.

70. Dear mother! Today a joyful notice. H. A. Lorentz has telegraphed me that the English expeditions have really proven the deflection of light at the sun.

71. If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be called research.

72. Elle est retrouvee, Quoi? - L'Eternite. C'est la mer allee Avec le soleil.

73. Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them - So they covered it up again...

74. I couldn't believe how happy his music made me and how good it was. He's a gift, and I didn't know. I mean, I knew 'Born in the USA' and 'Glory Days,' but I didn't know that he covered so much ground, and there was something in his music that touched what I was going through, the process of falling back in love with my America.

75. Education: 'The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.'

76. I will add that I have recently received from Hungary a little paper on non-Euclidean geometry in which I rediscover all my own ideas and results worked out with great elegance... The writer is a very young Austrian officer, the son of one of my early friends, with whom I often discussed the subject in 1798, although my ideas were at that time far removed from the development and maturity which they have received through the original reflections of this young man. I consider the young geometer J. Bolyai a genius of the first rank.

77. I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared. I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world.

78. One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.

79. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!

80. 'I am indebted to Scott W. Johnson, my fellow at the Claremont Institute, for many things over the years, but not many rate higher than his 'introducing' me to Elvis Presley. I came of age (i.e., reached the 9th grade), just in time for the 'British Invasion' and, despite my childhood memories, soon came to think of him as the ultimate in passe; so, I was astonished when Scott told me, a year or two ago, that in his opinion Elvis Presley was the greatest male vocalist of the 20th Century; I had never thought of him in that light, to put it mildly, but that conversation caused me to realize that I had never actually 'listened'; starting then, I did - with the aid of Scott's encyclopedic music collection -, so if you have never gotten past a cartoon image of Elvis, do yourself a favor and 'listen''.

81. A three standard deviation is a statistical fluctuation; a five standard deviation effect is a miracle. Quoted by Owen Chamberlain.

82. I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.

83. I'd never seen him out front before. It was also the first time I realized that Fred had sex appeal. Fred. Wherever did he get it?

84. 'Explanations are never the most interesting part of science.'

85. I've found him, I have Jesus in the trunk.

86. And in his eyes she read a love such as she had never known.

87. Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before - the unwhisperable secret of secrets - The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

88. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor....

89. 'When I entered the field of space physics in 1956, I recall that I fell in with the crowd believing, for example, that electric fields could not exist in the highly conducting plasma of space. It was three years later that I was shamed by S. Chandrasekhar into investigating Alfven's work objectively. My degree of shock and surprise in finding Alfven right and his critics wrong can hardly be described. I learned that a cosmic ray acceleration mechanism basically identical to the famous mechanism suggested by Fermi in 1949 had [previously] been put forth by Alfven.'

90. C'est par la logique qu'on demontre, c'est par l'intuition qu'on invente.

91. A science in its infancy is the least satisfactory, and, at the same time, the most profitable theme for a general description.

92. It is as though a star throws the whole secret history of its being into its spectrum, and we have only to learn how to read it aright in order to solve the most abstruse problems of the physical Universe.

93. Oft in one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.

94. What a dark world-who knows?- Ours to inhabit is! One touch and what a strange Glory might burst on us, What a hid universe!

95. It was like discovering a complete wine-filled cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavor never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me:.

96. Joe Bob says check it out.

97. 'Think,' I told him, 'what may be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the world's mysteries.'

98. Such as may make thee search the coffers round.

99. Of course she's still relevant. I wasn't actually in the country when her music first came out, so I only discovered it three or four years ago. What's amazing is that something like 'Wuthering Heights' still sounds so different. I actually saw her about nine months ago, we were just passing at an industry event and I went up to her and said I was a big fan and asked her about the new record. She was really excited about it but quite nervous because she felt that everyone was hyping it up a bit and she just wanted to bring out an album. You know, she's a musician.

100. I always heard about Kate Bush being considered one of the most influential female artists during the modern era of pop/rock music, but never understood what her appeal was... But when I recently stumbled upon her debut 1978 single, 'Wuthering Heights,' I found myself spending hours absorbing as much of her pre-1985 material as possible . . . Listening to an early Kate Bush album brings you far, far, away to a dreamworld filled with pixies and love and Peter Pan and pure hearts . . . 'Wuthering Heights' and the rest of The Kick Inside display all of Bush's trademarks: a literary consciousness; flourishing, heartfelt waves and the ability to successfully incorporate just about every eccentric vocal style you've never heard into each song.