Attributed in the "quote of the day" source code of the “Fortune” computer program (June 1987); more at "The Most Exciting Phrase in Science Is Not ‘Eureka!’ But ‘That’s funny …’" at Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/
General sources
“It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries.”
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.
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Buckminster Fuller 171
American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inv… 1895–1983Related quotes
"Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities: Science Views Media" Speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anaheim, California (25 January 1999)
Context: Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago.
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”
reported by Lance Dixon http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/10/03/guest-post-lance-dixon-on-calculating-amplitudes/
“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”
“Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery — what it all means…”
New York Times interview (1985)
“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
"Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity", p. 125
Eight Little Piggies (1993)
Laplace, p. 347.
Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859)
“The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.”
Source: The Creative Process, 1958, p. 97 Partly cited in: Daniel C. Schlenof. " 50 Years Ago: Greatest Scientific Discovery is Science Itself http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/50-100-150-scientific-creativity/," in Scientific American, Aug. 18, 2008.
Context: The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. I have used three words to describe these far - reaching changes : discovery, invention and creation. There are contexts in which one of these words is more appropriate than the others.