“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

—  Robert Oppenheimer

As quoted in "Why Curiosity Driven Research?" by Robert V. Moody (17 February 1995) http://www.math.mun.ca/~edgar/moody.html

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Robert Oppenheimer25
American theoretical physicist and professor of physics 1904–1967

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