Unforeseen Discoveries Quotes

I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

Breakthroughs are by definition unpredicted events. Therefore predicting breakthroughs is a particularly difficult business.

Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises

If there ever was a misnomer, it is "exact science." Science has always been full of mistakes. The present day is no exception. And our mistakes are good mistakes; they require a genius to correct. Of course, we do not see our own mistakes.

Many of the things that have happened in the laboratory have happened in ways it would have been impossible to foresee, but not impossible to plan for in a sense. I do not think Dr. Whitney deliberately plans his serendipity but he is built that way; he has the art-an instinctive way of preparing himself by his curiosity and by his interest in people and in all kinds of things and in nature, so that the things he learns react on one another and thereby accomplish things that would be impossible to foresee and plan.

Men will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences. Science will go on whether we are pessimistic or optimistic, as I am. More interesting discoveries than we can imagine will be made, and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.

Although I'm a business major out of McGill University, I know nothing... but then I found out much later in life, nobody knows anything.

Reading history, one rarely gets the feeling of the true nature of scientific development, in which the element of farce is as great as the element of triumph.

When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance.

[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define "serendipity" as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.

The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.

The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored

There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.

The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.

All right, I will read what's in my pocket.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

It's funny how you can intensely investigate one very particular thing, and then it can lead you to other things through links and stuff like that. It's like you're going on this selective, very precise detour. But then it is strange because with it being so quick, there must be a difference.

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.

You never know what your next dig is going to find.