Antony Beevor Quotes

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

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

I think fondly of the rabbit holes I disappeared down when I researched papers for history and English because I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, or because I had to go through so much material to find examples for my thesis.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that's really not the way it worked.

[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.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

Things you never thought were going to turn into something end up being the most important things in your life. You have to learn to not try to control it.

Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

You learn in life that a lot of things are the result of effort, but some things, in terms of scale, are random.

I always tell people go see something you don't know about. Something you didn't read a ton about on the internet. Something that you don't know what's going to happen because I think that kind of pleasure of finding something new and discovering it, creates a hunger in you.

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.

It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity.

To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

Serendipity... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.

Discoveries are made by pursuing possibilities suggested by existing knowledge.

In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.

Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

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.

Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.