high on science

....creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organised. It arises spontaeneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organisation, infelxible, bureaucratic rules, and mountains of futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners.

....scientists are always wrong, yet they always go on. What makes them continue? Often it is addiction to puzzle-solving and ambition to be recognised by their peers.

....the technology needed to fill the mind with untruth, with a resistance to new learning and to anything that might conduce to improvement has been known for 5000 years or more and is known as "education."

- from 'High On Science', in I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity by Max F. Perutz

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