Success Lessons from Legendary Scientists

The best scientists from the last five centuries were extraordinary human beings with great powers of observation, imagination and deduction. They expanded the limits of our world and thinking through their boldness and willingness to go where others did not dare.

What success lessons can we learn by studying their lives?

Galileo Galilei: Believe in yourself, even if you are alone.

Galileo Galilei 1564-1642

Astronomer, Physicist, Engineer

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”

Can you imagine finding yourself in a situation where every single person on earth disagreed with something you said? What would you do? Would you surrender and go along with the majority or would you just stick to your guns?

This was exactly the position that the celebrated scientists Galileo Galilei found himself in, when he began to argue that the earth was not the centre of the universe. At that time, it was widely believed that God had made the earth the centre, a view known as the geocentric view. But Galileo was a clear and scientific thinker. His logic led him inexorably to one conclusion: there was no way that the earth was the centre of anything.

The telescope had just been invented, and Galileo spent a lot of time studying Venus and the moons of Jupiter. His calculations led him to heliocentrism — the conclusion that the universe was very different from what the Bible described. In 1610, he published Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing his conclusions. The Catholic church was greatly angered. In 1616 the Roman Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be “foolish and absurd” and a heresy. Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas.

But for Galileo, who has been described as the “father of modern physics”, the “father of the scientific method” and even the “father of modern science”, the truth was the truth.

In a moment of deep frustration, he observed, “We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.” He believed everyone could reach the truth if they looked within themselves.

The more he observed, the more proof he found. He proposed a theory of tides in 1616 and argued that the tides were further evidence that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. In 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which implicitly defended heliocentrism and was immensely popular. For the church, this was the last straw. The Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633, and found him “vehemently suspect of heresy” and sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment. He was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642.

After his trial, Galileo was asked to formally and in public renounce his beliefs. Against his deepest beliefs, he was forced to recant his earliest statements and say that he had been in error. But according to one disputed story, when he left the courtroom, he looked up at the sky and stamped the ground, and said, “And yet it moves!”

Galileo teaches us the value of thinking clearly and standing by what you perceive to be true, even against overwhelming odds. This abiding value is a mark of many other great men.

Another marvelous lesson that Galileo taught us through his own example was that if one is humble enough, one can learn from everyone. His curious mind was always full of questions and he had something to ask everyone. It is a mark of his greatness that he said once, “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.”

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Isaac Newton: Ask the right questions — then find the answers.

Isaac Newton 1643-1727

Mathematician, Physicist, Astronomer, Theologian and Author

According to the legend, Sir Isaac Newton was lying on the grass in a lawn when an apple landed on his head. It was then that he had a brilliant brain-flash about why apples fall straight to the ground, and came up with the idea of universal gravity.

The story may be apocryphal but what is true is that Newton was one of the most curious people in the history of science. He constantly observed the details of phenomena and life around him, and asked himself hundreds of questions. The reason why Newton is regarded with such great awe is that he didn’t stop there. Once he had a question, he just did not let go of it. Like a dog with a bone, he would worry it ceaselessly till he reached the answer.

When he saw brilliant colours emerging when light passed through prisms, or rainbows when rain passed through waterdrops, he asked: Why does light split into different colours when it exits that prism?

Watching ice melting in different times of the year, he asked: Why does that block of ice melt quicker in the summer than it does during the winter?

Watching a game of football, he wondered: Why does that ball only move when it is pushed?

Watching it move, he wondered: What makes the ball slow down and stop?

Newton’s tireless question for answers have earned him the sobriquet of the father of modern science. He gave the world differential calculus, the three laws of motion, explained the diffraction of light, and most famously, he gave us the concept of universal gravity.

Did an apple actually fall on his head? Did he have a brilliant flash of insight? Probably not. In his own words to a friend, he described his thoughts on an idyllic summer afternoon in Grantham in 1666, when he watched an apple falling from a tree. He didn’t ask why it fell, but his thoughts went something more like this: “”Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the Earth’s centre? Assuredly the reason is, that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth’s centre, not in any side of the Earth.”

What if, his thoughts continued, the force that holds the moon in its orbit and the force that cause the apple to fall to the ground were one and the same? This frighteningly simple thought is the germ out of which Newton’s theory of universal gravity grew. And it took several years of hard work and thinking.

From Sir Isaac Newton we can learn the immense power of the right questions, and the importance of not letting them go until an answer has been found.

We can also learn the invaluable habit of keeping detailed notes of everything we see, observe and think. For a man whose mind was always busy and questing, note taking was a life-saving habit that he seems to have had from a young age.

The remarkable thing about Newton’s note-taking habit was that he scribbled extensive notes even into books that he was reading, in addition to dog-earing the corners of selected pages. In fact, his marginal notes were so copious that they would often cover every square centimetre of available white space on the page. Needless to say, this habit earned many sharp rebukes from the librarians he borrowed from.

Newton also created handwritten indexes and contents lists. The indexes are much like modern, arranged alphabetically or by topic, listing page numbers directly after each entry.

The Cambridge University Library’s digital collection now includes high-resolution scans of Newton’s undergraduate notebooks, with browsable and zoomable pages. However, you might not get much from most of the pages unless you speak Latin, the language Newton wrote his notes in. The one lesson you can pick up, of course, is the great importance of taking notes to keep your many thoughts organized if you intend to make a difference in the world.

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Marie Curie: Never stop working; never stop trying

Marie Curie 1867-1934

Scientist, inventor

It’s not common for a person to win a Nobel prize. It’s even less common for a person to win two Nobel prizes. If that person also happens to be a woman, it approaches the boundaries of the impossible. And yet that is precisely the recognition received by Marie Curie: the first woman to win Nobel prizes in two different categories, physics and chemistry. Her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity, a term she coined, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium.

If you were to ask her how one achieves that kind of global success, she would say: “Never stop working, and never stop trying.”

Her life is a testimonial to that belief. She was born into the hardship of a poor Polish family. She lived in times when it was unheard of for a woman to become a scientist. Her father encouraged her interest in science and supported but he was not well-off. To attend Sorbonne University in Paris — one of the few that admitted women into its classrooms —, she had to first work as a governess in Poland for months to earn the money.

“Life is not easy for any of us,” she said. “We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”

Marie Curie understood the value of endless hard work, because that was the foundation of her own life. She believed in the power of endlessly seeking perfection, of improving upon the best. “”One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done,” she once said.

Her love of striving to make things better began with herself: she was a great advocate of lifelong self-improvement. “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals,” she said. “Each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity.”

When she made her game-changing discovery of radioactivity, one of the first uses to which she put the new knowledge was in developing X-ray machines for battlefield medicine so that bullets and shrapnel lodged inside soldiers’ bodies could be easily located and removed.

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Alexander Graham Bell: Your work depends on your workspace

Alexander Graham Bell 1847-1922

Inventor

Most people remember Alexander Graham Bell as the father of the telephone, a device that profoundly changed human lives and continues to do so. But those who knew him closely, spoke of a brilliant, focussed, restless genius with eccentric and strange work habits. Known to be a shabby, sloppy dresser, with unruly hair and beard, this scientist cum sage’s work spaces and laboratories were chaotic with overflowing columns of publications, stationery, paper and sketches, mingled with wires, batteries and research supplies of all kinds.

Bell knew instinctively that the work environment directly affects the quality and quantity of the work itself. “He was convinced that his physical surroundings induced specific trains of thoughts,” his biographer explains, “so he established particular workspaces for particular purposes.” Some people have dubbed Bell’s method of using different workplaces to promote different kinds of thinking as “location-based prompts.”

Although his home was in Washington DC, he spent more and more time in the home he had built at Cape Breton, a remote island in Nova Scotia. Dubbed Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh, the dwelling included a large house, a laboratory housed in a wooden shed, and a moored houseboat.

Bell’s daughter recalls that her father divided his time between these three different “workstations,” according to the cognitive task at hand. “In the little office near the laboratory he occupied his mind with problems connected with the experiments. In his study in the house, he thought and worked over his theories of flight. While the Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh was the place to think of genetics and heredity.”

The DC house was similarly divided into different workspaces. The study within his home was reserved for responding to mail. At the Volta Bureau, which he founded to conduct research related to the deaf, he focused on just that; his wife and his mother were deaf and working with the hearing impaired was Bell’s passion in life. When his mind was moved towards abstract thinking, he would retreat to a hut in his son-in-law’s backyard overlooking a creek and reflect.

His wife Mabel put it colorfully once: “You like to fly around like a butterfly sipping honey, more or less from a flower here or another flower there.” But Bell’s “flightiness” was actually a big part of his genius, born from his ability to find novel connections between disparate ideas.

Paying attention to the different kinds of work you do and the different kinds of places where you could do them best is the lesson we can all learn from the great Bell. He had formidable power of focus and concentration. “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand,” he was fond of saying. “The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

Bell used his powers of focused attentiveness to continually educate himself. He believed that as long a person remained a learner, his mind would remain vibrant and fresh. “Self-education is a lifelong affair,” he believed. “There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.”

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Albert Einstein: Be humble

1879-1955

Theoretical physicist

The man who stood our understanding of the universe on its head with his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein, lived a simple, uncomplicated and incredibly humble life. He never stopped being in utter awe of nature and the cosmos, and was fond of reminding people that we are mere specks against the vastness of the universe. Grandiose notions of success and ego are completely misleading and illusory.

Studying the life and stories of Einstein, we realize how true greatness shines best when it is divorced from ego and arrogance. In the case of Einstein, humility was inherent, not a trait he cultivated. Though he inspired millions and was a legend to others, he did not hold himself in awe. He truly had a childlike spontaneity that made him incapable of artifice, manipulation and self-serving.

Nothing illustrates these as well as an incident shortly after he moved to America, when he was invited to address some mathematicians at Princeton University. It took some persuasion, for Einstein claimed that there was nothing he could tell them that they didn’t already know. But he finally agreed to talk on tensor analysis, a tool essential to the mathematics of relativity theory.

But as word got around that Einstein was going to be a speaker than weekend, Princeton University campus was filled with cars and great crowds of people trying to get into the small auditorium at Fine Hall. Though only mathematicians had been invited, the small announcement had been seen by students, who told other students, who told their parents, who came picking up friends along the way. Princeton’s townspeople of also arrived. Everyone wanted to hear the great man speak.

When Einstein saw the crowd, it never once occurred to him that they had come to hear him. “I never realized that in America there was so much interest in tensor analysis,” he said.

Asked to address an audience at Princeton, Einstein kept insisting that he had nothing to say. When he finally found himself before the microphone, he smiled apologetically and said, “I find that I have nothing to say.”

The truth about Einstein, and the lesson we can all learn from him, is that he was an unassuming, unostentatious and friendly man, utterly modest, truly uninterested in worldly honors and worried by the adulation heaped upon him. No wonder he inspires everyone, scientists and laymen alike.

Einstein’s humility came with a clear understanding of what he could and could not do, and he strived to work within his circle of competence was. Shortly after the death of Israel’s president Chaim Weizmann in 1952, Einstein, then aged 73, was offered the position of becoming the second president of Israel. He politely declined the offer, explaining in his letter than not only was he getting old but also lacked the “natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people”.

For a man whose main competence was his blinding brilliance in science, EInstein trusted his intuition to an extraordinary degree, calling it the “the only real valuable thing”. He described his own intuitive processes at a physics conference in Kyoto in 1922, saying that he used images to solve his problems and found the words later.

From Einstein we learn to trust intuition. “The gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge,” he told a friend once. “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration…. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.”

It is completely in accord with his deeply humble temperament that Einstein believed deeply in the need for and the power of gratitude. “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead,” he said. “I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

References

Did Galileo really say And yet it moves? http://tinyurl.com/y32c5kz9

We cannot teach people anything http://tinyurl.com/y5nsfv7o

Galileo Galilei http://tinyurl.com/h97yeky

Galileo affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

What questions did Isaac Newton ask? http://tinyurl.com/y4zbzyuj

The core of truth behind Sir Idsaac Newton’s apple? http://tinyurl.com/y9jb43m7

The full story of Newton’s falling Apple revelation http://tinyurl.com/y42e3ulr

Isaac Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Isaac Newton: why you should steal ideas http://tinyurl.com/y63d4pg2

Isaac Newton and his questions http://tinyurl.com/yxdff27h

The legend of Newton’s most foolish invention http://tinyurl.com/y2c5pbnn

10 Isaac Newton inventions http://mentalfloss.com/article/523834/10-isaac-newton-inventions

Top 10 Isaac Newton inventions http://tinyurl.com/y3f4mdcx

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Before anything else, preparation is the key http://tinyurl.com/y2mhkc2q

5 must-read lessons from the life of Alexander Graham Bell http://tinyurl.com/y5qpcsjz

Alexander Graham Bell https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

Bell’s secret to greater productivity http://tinyurl.com/y5mygcsh

Albert Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

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