Innovative Discovery Quotes

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.

Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.

With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.

Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from planned search for specific objectives. A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the individual to follow his own curiosity.

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create... he discovers.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.

Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart.

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.

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.

The best research is the research that you don't know that you are doing.