The marvel of discovery

Every age in history has bestowed honour and glory upon the great discoverers of the world, for discovery of something absolutely new in the realms of science is considered one of the greatest of all human feats – little short of a miracle.

How does man actually reach the point of making a discovery?

The answer to this has been very simply and beautifully expressed by the Nobel Laureate in Physics, Albert Szent-gyorgyi: “Discovery is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.”

The profundity of this statement is aptly illustrated by the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the apple. One day Newton witnessed the quite ordinary event of an apple falling from a tree – a happening which is quite commonly noticed, but seldom remarked upon. No one had ever really given any thought before to the downward fall of the apple. But Newton’s razor-sharp mind elicited an extraordinary significance from this ordinary event, which led to his formulation of the Law of Gravity. Newton discovered something which no one had thought in something which everybody had seen.

Such a spirit of enquiry is the key to all worthy success, and without it, no individual or nation can rise to a superior position. No people can come to the forefront without fostering the will to discover.

One day Newton witnessed the quite ordinary event of an apple falling from a tree – a happening which is quite commonly noticed, but seldom remarked upon.