Startle Quotes (6 quotes)
I’ve never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph.D. I said I didn’t have one and he looked startled. “You mean you’re in the same racket I am,” he said, “you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?” That’s really what I do.
Quoted in Sally Helgeson, 'Every Day', Bookletter (6 Dec 1976), 3, No. 8, 3. As quoted and cited in Dana Richards, 'Martin Gardner: A “Documentary”', collected in Elwyn R. Berlekamp and Tom Rodgers (ed.) The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: A Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner (1999), 8-9.
If you’re too sloppy, then you never get reproducible results, and then you never can draw any conclusions; but if you are just a little sloppy, then when you see something startling, you say, “Oh, my God, what did I do, what did I do different this time?” And if you really accidentally varied only one parameter, you nail it down, and that’s exactly what happened [to produce new experimental discoveries]. So I called it the "Principle of Limited Sloppiness".
From Interview (1978) for Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California (oralhistories.library.caltech.edu), Online PDF version, 76-77. Delbrück also stated he first made a casual remark about the “Principle of Limited Sloppiness” as chairman at a meeting in Oak Ridge after the war.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979, 1997), 78.
Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress.
(1880), commenting on the manner in which Edison announced a successful light bulb. In Charles William Siemens and Edward Fisher Bamber (ed.), The Scientific Works of C. William Siemens: A Collection of Addresses, lectures, etc. (1889), Vol. 3, 221.
The most useless investigation may prove to have the most startling practical importance: Wireless telegraphy might not yet have come if Clerk Maxwell had been drawn away from his obviously “useless” equations to do something of more practical importance. Large branches of chemistry would have remained obscure had Willard Gibbs not spent his time at mathematical calculations which only about two men of his generation could understand.
Quoted in Larry R. Squire (ed.), The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography (1996), Vol. 1, 350-351. The above is a highlight excerpted from a longer quote beginning “To prove to an indignant questioner ….” in this same collection for A. V. Hill.
To live is so startling it leaves little time for other occupations.
From Letter to T.W. Higginson (late 1872), in Thomas H Johnson (ed.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1969), 500.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
