Albert Einstein quote's about Research

“If we knew what it is we were doing, it would not be called research. Would it?”

Albert Einstein

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Controversy about this quote :

Not to dismiss the underpinning sentiment of your leading quote “If we knew what it is we were doing, it would not be called research. Would it?”, I thought I’d better let you know that it is not by Einstein. And, that it’s not a true quote at all. It’s a one of those ‘internet whispers’ that have been around long enough, and repeated and reworded often enough, that everyone takes it as a ‘truth’.
The reality is that it came from a different Albert, and that it was recounted by Aldous Huxley in his collection of lectures entitled ‘The Human Situation’ in 1978. The real statement, by Dr Albert Szent-Györgyi, made presumable around the time of the lectures in 1959, is as follows:
“When I first came to this country ten years ago, I had the
greatest difficulty to find means for my basic research. People
asked me, what are you doing, what is it good for? I had to say, it
is no good at all.

Then they asked, then exactly what are you going
to do? I had to answer, I don’t know, that is why it is research.

So the next question was, how do you expect us to waste money on
you when you don’t know what you do or why you do it? This
question I could not answer.”
(Huxley 1978, pp. 104-105)

As I said, this does not undermine the sentiment in which you used it, in fact it probably strengthens it given that Huxley used it in his discussion on the value of basic research over the ad hoc or targeted. But it would be nice to promote the original author, a Nobel Prize winning researcher himself, over the noise of internet fiction.

Kind regards

Glenn P. Costin

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"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking".

Here are some other quotes by Albert Einstein:

1. "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
2. "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
3. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
4. "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."
5. "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."