1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), Moral of the work
Context: It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.
“Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery — what it all means…”
New York Times interview (1985)
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Martha Graham 48
American dancer and choreographer 1894–1991Related quotes
“To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.”
Not only Planck but also other physicists were initially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.
Referring to the difficulties physicists experienced understanding the discovery that energy exchange is quantized, in Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1988), p. 134
“This does not mean a meteor has fallen. This is the discovery of a star.”
Watts, Jonathan. “ Chinese Human Rights Activist Liu Xiaobo Sentenced to 11 Years in Jail http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-liu-xiaobo.” Guardian, December 25, 2009.
2000-09, 2009
Source: The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
¶ 6
State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ (1888)
Context: The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his “Wealth of Nations,” — namely, that labor is the true measure of price. But Adam Smith, after stating this principle most clearly and concisely, immediately abandoned all further consideration of it to devote himself to showing what actually does measure price, and how, therefore, wealth is at present distributed. Since his day nearly all the political economists have followed his example by confining their function to the description of society as it is, in its industrial and commercial phases. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
“The discovery of India — what have I discovered?”
The Discovery of India (1946)
Context: The discovery of India — what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is today and what she was in the long past. Today she is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling. If this is so in the present, how much more so to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings. Yet something has bound them together and binds them still. India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads. Overwhelmed again and again her spirit was never conquered, and today when she appears to be a plaything of a proud conqueror, she remains unsubdued and unconquered. About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.
“There is a beauty in discovery.”
Statement upon being appointed as UC Berkeley chancellor in 1958, as quoted Biographical Memoirs (2000) edited by Darleane C. Hoffman, p, 252 <!-- ISBN 0-309-07035-X National Academies Press-->
Context: There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.
[21 March 2011, Pavel Kroupa: The Dark Matter Crisis website, https://darkmattercrisis.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/question-c-ii-mond-works-far-too-well/]
reported by Lance Dixon http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/10/03/guest-post-lance-dixon-on-calculating-amplitudes/