Alice Roberts Quotes

Science requires speculation, creativity, and wild ideas.

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

I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, 'What happens next, what happens next?'

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.

Science is about filling in the details.

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

Research is creating new knowledge.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

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

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Experimentation is an active science.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

Well, it seems to me a scientist has need for both vision and confidence.

As soon as science has solved one problem, new ones arise. This is the essence of science, and it applies, of course, also to the field of essential oils.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

Kids are natural scientists.

That's the nice thing about doing research. Whatever you do is novel, so you always have this sense of novelty, even if you are only using a new gadget.

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.