Winter Turtle

Scientific research is an art form in this sense: It does not matter how you make a discovery, only that your claim is true and convincingly validated. The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper, and I suppose that if gifted with a full quiver, he also writes like a journalist. As a painter stands before bare canvas or a novelist recycles past emotion with eyes closed, he searches his imagination for subjects as much as for conclusions, for questions as much as for answers. Even if his highest achievement is only to perceive the need for a new instrument or theory, that may be enough to open the door to a new industry of research.

This level of creativity in science, as in art, depends as much on self-image as on talent. To be highly successful the scientist must be confident enough to steer for blue water, abandoning sight of land for a while. He values risk for its own sake. He keeps in mind that the footnotes of forgotten treatises are strewn with the names of the gifted but timid. If on the other hand he chooses, like the vast majority of his colleagues, to hug the coast, he must be fortunate enough to posses what I like to define as optimum intelligence for normal science: bright enough to see what needs to be done but not so bright as to suffer boredom doing it.