Carolyn Porco Quotes

There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.

The currencies of science are discoveries and ideas; the rewards are the excitement of going where nobody has been before and, if one is inclined to such things, the kudos of peer acclaim, plus funds to do more research.

The process of discovery in my field is very incremental. But there are moments when you realize you know something about the world nobody else knows. That's extraordinarily exhilarating.

I feel like an old-fashioned mountain climber when I am making discoveries, seeing something for the first time, realizing that no human before me has ever seen what I am seeing. It takes your breath away - for just a moment, you feel a pause in time, as you know you are crossing a boundary into a new realm of knowledge.

Being infinitely amazed, so do I give thanks to God, Who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things, unrevealed to bygone ages.

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

Boy, when you come to study something, and you come to understand it - you know, even if it's just a little discovery that you make, and you come to understand it on your own, it feels it's like the greatest high. It's like you just have found some incredibly secretive thing about nature.

To witness history and science being made in front of your eyes is the rush.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

It was about three o'clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me ... At first I was deeply shaken ... I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house ... and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock.

If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.

No-one really thought of fission before its discovery.

It was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else. This is the truth which neither envy nor malice can supress.

It is characteristic of fundamental discoveries, of great achievements of the intellect, that they retain an undiminished power upon the imagination of the thinker. The memorable experiment of Faraday with a disc rotating between two poles of a magnet, which has borne such magnificent fruit, has long passed into every-day experience; yet there are certain features about this embryo of the present dynamos and motors which even today appear to us striking, and are worthy of the most careful study.

While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.

A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.

Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

And Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a manner of computing the proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing over the bathing-stool. He leaped up as one possessed or inspired, crying, "I have found it! Eureka!".

A discovery must be, by definition, at variance with existing knowledge. During my lifetime, I made two. Both were rejected offhand by the popes of the field. Had I predicted these discoveries in my applications, and had those authorities been my judges, it is evident what their decisions would have been.

For me, whatever the outcome, it's nice to sit back to something and say, "Man, I'm really proud of that. I'm real proud of the experience that I had, I'm proud to be a part of something so iconic whether anyone watches it or not. They can't take away the experience that I had.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

I would not give my rotating field discovery for a thousand inventions, however valuable... A thousand years hence, the telephone and the motion picture camera may be obsolete, but the principle of the rotating magnetic field will remain a vital, living thing for all time to come.

I once wrote a lecture for Manchester University called « Moments of Discovery » in which I said that there are two moments that are important. There's the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that's the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you've got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.