Scientific progress, then, is not unidirectional but multidirectional and its characteristic discoveries both add new information and reformulate old information. Scientific curiosity, in this context, drives individual scientists and scientific communities to fill internal and external network cavities with informational nodes and conceptual edges

This, after all, is the scientist’s calling: to imagine or to do what no one has done before.

Max Delbrück was a Nobel laureate who studied physics and biology. He obviously believed that scientists should be careful and rigorous in their work. But he thought that a bit of looseness was helpful too, as it allowed room for the unexpected and accidental. He called this the Principle of Limited Sloppiness.

as Nagel predicted. But there is value and glory in the striving. On this journey through nature’s Umwelten, our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.