Connie Willis Quotes

The most valuable discoveries have found their origin in the most trivial accidents.

Most technological advances in our life now come from serendipitous discoveries. That is a contraction of rocket technology and computer technology and atomic clock technology.

Winning a Nobel Prize isn't about being clever at all. It's about making... at least in physiology or medicine, it's about making discoveries, and you don't have to be clever to make a discovery, I don't think; it just comes up and punches you on the nose.

Guessing before proving! Need I remind you that it is so that all important discoveries have been made?

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

Science is not the glamour that's portrayed in films. It's a lot of drudgery work, along with the wonderfully exciting periods when you discover something.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

Many of the world's greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most.

Science really creates wealth and opportunity which did not exist before. Whereas the old order was based on competition, the new order of science makes possible, for the first time, a cooperative creative effort in which every one is the gainer and no one the loser.

The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well-prepared to receive them.

[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.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong... There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated.

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

In science, mistakes always precede the truth

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

Sometimes they're nothing, sometimes they're something, sometimes there's a connection that years later may show up. All of this information is useful.