Ask An Impertinent Question And You Are

Da Vinci Was As Great A Mechanic And Inventor As Were Newton And His Friends. Yet A Glance At His Notebooks Shows Us That What Fascinated Him About Nature Was Its Variety, Its Infinite Adaptability, The Fitness And The Individuality Of All Its Parts. By Contrast What Made Astronomy A Pleasure To Newton Was Its Unity, Its Singleness, Its Model Of A Nature In Which The Diversified Parts Were Mere Disguises For The Same Blank Atoms.

Certainty Ends Inquiry.

One Original Thought Is Worth The Sum Total Of Human Knowledge, Because It Advances The Sum Total Of Human Knowledge By That One Original Thought.

[john] Dalton Was A Man Of Regular Habits. For Fifty-seven Years He Walked Out Of Manchester Every Day; He Measured The Rainfall, The Temperature-a Singularly Monotonous Enterprise In This Climate. Of All That Mass Of Data, Nothing Whatever Came. But Of The One Searching, Almost Childlike Question About The Weights That Enter The Construction Of These Simple Molecules-out Of That Came Modern Atomic Theory. That Is The Essence Of Science: Ask An Impertinent Question, And You Are On The Way To The Pertinent Answer.

It Is Not The Business Of Science To Inherit The Earth, But To Inherit The Moral Imagination; Because Without That, Man And Beliefs And Science Will Perish Together.