“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
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Abraham Pais 19
American Physicist 1918–2000Related quotes
“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”
In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted.
Nobel lecture (1973)
“Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery — what it all means…”
New York Times interview (1985)
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.
God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k
Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.
“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
Attributed to Szent-Györgyi in: IEEE (1985) Bridging the present and the future: IEEE Professional Communication Society conference record, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 16-18, 1985. p. 14.
“If we want to make a discovery, we have to take a risk”
in My experiences in different laboratories, autobiographical speech by von Békésy published in Fizikai Szemle 1999/5. 166.o.
Context: If we want to make a discovery, we have to take a risk, since everything new was discovered by accident or by the fact that somebody took a chance and went ahead when there wasn't 100 percent safety for the solution.
