Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg, 1743-1799, German Scientist & Philosopher, Notebooks
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation illustrates a way in which science is frequently at odds with politics. Our politicians realize the importance of scientific research to our standard of living, economy, and quality of life. So they want to support research and development programs. However, budgeting and planning for these in terms of expected or desired results is virtually impossible. So scientific research, especially basic research is not susceptible to the usual planning and monitoring that is so common and effective in construction projects or other applications of science and technology. It is hard to predict when and which scientists will have the next critical idea. It is very difficult to hold scientists or administrators accountable for scientific research results because of this factor. See {624876}.
This is a fundamental difference between science and religion. Politicians fall on both sides. Those who take a scientific view that everything in politics is provisional and might change and those who are ideological where the ideology is a fixed credo.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
