Courage

Heinz Maier-Leibnitz

I want to come back to this question: courage. It is my feeling that we must have courage to be aware that we know very little of what we do. A scientist nearly always does things which he does not understand and quite often he must even be aware that there are others who would understand if they were in his place. I would say that a great incentive is doing new things is the desire to learn rather than what has been called rebellion just now. [Jacques] Monod commented that assumption came first and discovery second; I think this is nearly always the case. You have assumptions in your mind, but you should not be too strict (unlike some of our theoretical physicists who believe that they make the theories and the experimentalists then make the discoveries which just prove their theories or disprove them). Another thing which takes courage, especially among the young scientists, is to work somewhere where either they are alone, and nobody else understands what goes on in the field, or to develop and use a new method by which they can hope to do something which nobody has yet done or understood; all the specialists will laugh at them when they start. But it is by such things that you get a chance of discovering something which others have not appreciated because they have other ways of thinking.

Fonte: Krebs, H. A. & Shelley, J. H., orgs. 1975. The creative process in science and medicine. Amsterdã, Excerpta Medica.