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Sir Peter B. Medawar
(28 Feb 1915 - 2 Oct 1987)
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Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on Imagination (4 quotes)
>> Click for 53 Science Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
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>> Click for 53 Science Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
>> Click for Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on | Discovery | Evidence | Hypothesis | Mind | Process | Scientist | Theory | Truth |
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
For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Haldane could have made a success of any one of half a dozen careers—as mathematician, classical scholar, philosopher, scientist, journalist or imaginative writer. On his life’s showing he could not have been a politician, administrator (heavens, no!), jurist or, I think, a critic of any kind. In the outcome he became one of the three or four most influential biologists of his generation.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Scientists should not be ashamed to admit, as many of them apparently are ashamed to admit, that hypotheses appear in their minds along uncharted by-ways of thought; that they are imaginative and inspirational in character; that they are indeed adventures of the mind.
— 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.