There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge ' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.īut is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow. I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension. “A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science.
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