“Scientists work by a combination of intuition and insight in trying to understand a question.”
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science
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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan 29
Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologi… 1952Related quotes
“Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.”
Source: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Testimony in Niels Bohr : His Life and Work as Seen by His Friends and Colleagues (1967) edited by Stefan Rozental, p. 218; later in his own work, Niels Bohr's Times : In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (1991)
Context: The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante. The only way I knew to react to this unexpected statement was with a polite smile of disbelief. But evidently Bohr was serious. He explained how he had to approach every new question from a starting point of total ignorance. It is perhaps better to say that Bohr's strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight rather than erudition.
“Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands”
As quoted in The Birth of a New Physics (1959) by I. Bernard Cohen
Context: It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.
As quoted in "Return of the time lord" in The Guardian (27 September 2005)
“... the most important questions and insights and goals are unpredictable.”
email sent to David Brown, 1 January 2020, quoted in [Freeman Dyson - Science and Religion (151/157) (comments section), 27 July 2016, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwoVrSICaTA] (published by Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People)
Source: Timelike Infinity (1992), Chapter 7 (p. 218)