What are your motivational memes?

“It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.

"This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss."

-Sir Terry Pratchett

Just a quick note about the "shape" of DNA, if speaking of the double helix...that was discovered by a woman: Rosalind Franklin, who gave her life doing diffractional x-rays. She got cervical cancer from doing so many but discovered the shape of the double helix this way. The credit was given to Crick and Watson, who basically stole her research and then won the Nobel Prize.
 
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