Sublime

At least one of Gödel’s intuitions about proof turns out to have been mistaken;

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.

Feynman was a theoretical physicist par excellence. Newton had been both experimentalist and theorist in equal measure. Einstein was quite simply contemptuous of experiment, preferring to put his faith in pure thought. Feynman was driven to develop a deep theoretical understanding of nature, but he always remained close to the real and often grubby

Even after physicist Richard Feynman earned a Nobel prize, he thought of himself as a “confused ape” and approached everything around him with the same level of curiosity, which enabled him to see nuances that others dismissed. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.” Feynma

Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curi