"It is not the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden, violent discovery; science goes step by step and every man depends on the work of his predecessors.
When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery - a bolt from the blue - you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man or another, and it is the mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance.
Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected. "
— 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson Ernest Rutherford
Quoted in Robert B. Heywood, 'The Works of the Mind', The Scientist (1947), 178.
He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
