Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.
Jacob BronowskiThe basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
Jacob BronowskiThe great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Jacob BronowskiThe progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
Jacob BronowskiThe private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.
Jacob Bronowski