Research proverbs

Page 4

◆ The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

- Seneca99

◆ You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

- Ernest Cline99

◆ Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.

- Frank Herbert99

◆ The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

- Samuel Johnson99

◆ Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...

- Asa Don Brown99

◆ The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

- Steven Weinberg99

◆ I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again.

- Alexander Shulgin99

◆ I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.

- William Lawrence Bragg99

◆ What we find changes who we become.

- Peter Morville99

◆ Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.

- Robert McKee99

◆ Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

- Thomas Henry Huxley99

◆ An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

- Nicholas Murray Butler99

◆ With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.

- Lemony Snicket99

◆ Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

- Carl Sagan99

◆ The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.

- Paul A.M. Dirac99