Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is famous for being the research scientist who first discovered ‘Pulsars’. I discovered this whilst watching the BBC 4 series ‘Beautiful Minds’. During the programme, when asked about the ‘truth’ of science, she said: “If we assume we’ve arrived, we stop searching”. A quotation which certainly sounds like it comes from a beautiful mind.
This habit of stopping looking when we find a credible answer to a passing problem can become a real obstacle to innovation. The result is that we build up a wall of old truths which form a formidable barrier to the discovery of the next new truth.
Although it may be tempting to think that in some cases we can stop thinking, that we have indeed solved some issues for all time, the truth is that this is never the case. Forgetting this scientific fact is a recipe for repeating mistakes – the opposite of discovery.
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