Madrugar

The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examinations, that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized.

Michael Faraday


As Artes e as Ciências Nasceram dos Vícios

A astronomia nasceu da superstição; a retórica, da ambição, do ódio, da adulação, da mentira; a geometria, da ganância; a física, da curiosidade vã; e todas elas, mesmo a ética, do orgulho humano. As artes e as ciências devem portanto o seu nascimento aos nossos vícios, e nós deveríamos duvidar menos das suas vantagens se elas tivessem tido origem nas nossas virtudes. (...) Quantos perigos! Quantos caminhos equivocados na investigação das ciências? Por meio de quantos erros, milhares de vezes mais perigosos do que a verdade é útil, não é preciso abrir caminho a fim de alcançá-la? O problema é patente; pois a falsidade admite um número infinito de combinações; mas a verdade possui apenas um modo de ser.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 'Discurso sobre as Ciências e as Artes'


Preludes to science — So you believe the sciences would have emerged and matured, if they had not been preceded by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches who with their promises and false claims created a thirst, hunger, and taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more has had to be promised than can ever be fulfilled in order that anything at ali be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge. Those things which now appear to us to be preludes and exercises preparatory to science were in the past certainly not practised and felt to be any such thing. Similarly perhaps to a distant age the whole of religion will appear as an exercise and prelude. Perhaps religion could have been the strange means of making it possible one day for a few individuais to enjoy the whole self-sufficiency of a god and ali his power of self-redemption. Indeed - one may ask - would man ever have learned to feel hunger for himself and to find satisfaction and fullness in himself without this religious training and prehistory? Did Prometheus first have to imagine having stolen light and pay for it before he could finally discover that he had created light by desiring light, and that not only man but also god was the work of his own hands and clay in his hands? All mere images of the sculptor - no less than delusion, theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia of all those who know?

Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science


We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.

Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Lecture