
“It’s good to remember that in science, mistakes always precede discoveries. Be teachable.”
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
“It’s good to remember that in science, mistakes always precede discoveries. Be teachable.”
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
As quoted in The God Particle (1993) by Leon Lederman – ISBN 978–0–618–71168–0
Context: The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations between Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.
Discourse no. 13, delivered on December 11, 1786; vol. 2, p. 134.
Discourses on Art
Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)
Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 2. The Age of Innocence
Mathematical and Physical Papers, Vol.2 http://books.google.com/books?id=kNrVAAAAMAAJ (1884) "On Mechanical Antecedents of Motion, Heat and Light" (originally published 1854, 1855)
Thermodynamics quotes
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: … at several times we have thought that optics was a finished science, where the last word had been said, or almost. Each time the discovery of new facts, the overthrow or extension of accepted theories, reminded us that science is never finished.
The impression that science is over has occurred many times in various branches of human knowledge, often because of an explosion of discoveries made by a genius or a small group of men in such a short time that average minds could hardly follow and had the unconscious desire to take breath, to get used to the unexpected things that came to be revealed. Dazzled by these new truths, they could not see beyond. Sometimes an entire century did not suffice to produce this accommodation.
Robert E. Moritz, " On the Significance of Characteristic Curves of Composition https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_65/June_1904/On_the_Significance_of_Characteristic_Curves_of_Composition," Popular Science Monthly 65 (June 1904), as cited in: Benjamin Morgan (2017), The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. p. 236