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Quotes from The Birth of a New Physics — Ernest Rutherford

1871–1937 New Zealand

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It is not in 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, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this 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.

Attributed The Birth of a New Physics (1959)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ernest Rutherford (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.