If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

Science is the art of the solvable.

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.