Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenien… - Norbert Wiener

The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.

As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.