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Sir Peter B. Medawar
(28 Feb 1915 - 2 Oct 1987)
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Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on Discovery (8 quotes)
>> Click for 53 Science Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
>> Click for Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on | Evidence | Hypothesis | Imagination | Mind | Process | Scientist | Theory | Truth |
>> Click for 53 Science Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
>> Click for Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on | Evidence | Hypothesis | Imagination | Mind | Process | Scientist | Theory | Truth |
Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not not enough that a problem should be “interesting.” … The problem must be such that it matters what the answer is—whether to science generally or to mankind.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. The imaginative preconception—a “hypothesis”—arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, a product of a blaze of insight. It comes anyway from within and cannot be achieved by the exercise of any known calculus of discovery.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory does not travel.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Scientific discovery, or the formulation of scientific theory, starts in with the unvarnished and unembroidered evidence of the senses. It starts with simple observation—simple, unbiased, unprejudiced, naive, or innocent observation—and out of this sensory evidence, embodied in the form of simple propositions or declarations of fact, generalizations will grow up and take shape, almost as if some process of crystallization or condensation were taking place. Out of a disorderly array of facts, an orderly theory, an orderly general statement, will somehow emerge.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
This whole period was a golden age of immunology, an age abounding in important synthetic discoveries all over the world, a time we all thought it was good to be alive. We, who were working on these problems, all knew each other and met as often as we could to exchange ideas and hot news from the laboratory.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
See also:
- 28 Feb - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Medawar's birth.
- Advice to a Young Scientist, by Sir Peter Brian Medawar. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Peter Medawar.