"The relativity and quantum theories provide good examples of one of the most characteristic features in the development of scientific ideas—namely the fact that every major advance, resulting in a new representation which post factum can be seen to have reduced the earlier picture to one whose results approximate closely to those of the newer one in special cases, has been connected with a revolutionary change in outlook, and with a radical revision of the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the earlier picture. It is at such turning-points that scientific thought is most clearly revealed as creative speculation, kept within certain boundaries, and corrected, by facts and experimental evidence... akin to that sphere of inspiration which brings about the great creations of art: both constitute sudden and unpredictable insights into reality which no artificial and mechanical devices, such as computers, could ever achieve. ...science in the making can be seen to be as much an experiment with ideas as a search after significant experimental data."
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Shmuel Sambursky, Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (1974).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_science
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History of science
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