“I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident.”
Quoted in Sally Helgeson, "Every Day", Bookletter, Vol. 3, No. 8 (6 December 1976), p. 8
Context: I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph. D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do.
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Martin Gardner 16
recreational mathematician and philosopher 1914–2010Related quotes
“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”
Source: Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), Ch. XI : Self-Culture — Facilities and Difficulties.
Source: The Lives Of George And Robert Stephenson
Context: 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.
“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.”
As quoted in Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (1973) by G. J. Whitrow, p. 42
Variants:
If you can't explain your physics to a barmaid it is probably not very good physics.
As quoted in Journal of Advertising Research (March-April 1998)
A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.
As quoted in The Language of God (2006) by Francis Collins, p. 60
“Minkowski made a remarkable discovery”
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)
Context: Minkowski made a remarkable discovery concerning the Lorentz formulae. He showed that, although each observer has his own private space and private time, a public concept which is the same for all observers can be formed by combining space and time as a kind of 'distance' by multiplying it by the velocity of light, c; in other words, with any time interval we can associate a definite spatial interval, namely the distance which light can travel in empty space in that period. If, according to a particular observer, the difference in time between any two events is T, this associated spatial interval is cT. Then, if R is the space-distance between these two events, Minkowski showed that the difference of the squares of cT and R has the same value for all observers in uniform relative motion. The square root of this quantity is called the space-time interval between two events. Hence, although time and three-dimensional space depend on the observer, this new concept of space-time is the same for all observers.<!--p.64
Source: Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), Ch. XI : Self-Culture — Facilities and Difficulties
“None of the great discoveries was made by a "specialist" or a "researcher."”
Fischerisms (1944)
“I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way”
"To Whom It May Concern", from Adrian Mitchell's Greatest Hits (1991)
Written in 1965, after hearing British troops might be sent to the Vietnam War.
