“I am awaiting the day when people remember the fact that discovery does not work by deciding what you want and then discovering it.”
How not to create tigers http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.882769, Physics Today, Volume 52, Issue 8, August 1999, p. 11
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David Mermin 8
American physicist 1935Related quotes
Dopo una scottatura sentimentale avevo deciso di partecipare ma senza volermi legare a nessuno. Come poi è successo a me con Jeremias non si sa mai cosa ci aspetta.
Frasi di Soleil Sorge https://aforismi.meglio.it/aforismi-di.htm?n=Soleil+Sorge, aforismi.meglio.it.
“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.
Lecture at Yale University, "Chemical Achievement and Hope for the Future." (October 1947) Published in Science in Progress. Sixth Series. Ed. George A. Baitsell. 100-21, (1949).
1940s-1960s
Context: Science cannot be stopped. Man will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences – and we cannot predict what they will be. Science will go on — whether we are pessimistic, or are optimistic, as I am. I know that great, interesting, and valuable discoveries can be made and will be made… But I know also that still more interesting discoveries will be made that I have not the imagination to describe — and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.
Broadcast (27 September 1938), quoted in The Times (28 September 1938), p. 10
Prime Minister
Rampart Institute (Society for Libertarian Life edition), speech from 1978, p. 14.
Does Government Protection Protect (1979)
First address as Vice-President, widely reported as having been delivered while he was inebriated. (5 March 1865).
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