GE Problem Definition, Focusing, and Simplicity
Geoscience
Type Quotes
A problem well stated is half solved.
-John Dewey
The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world.
-C. P. Snow
Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.
-George Sand
Most scientists and engineers don’t think much about the influence of language on their research strategies. But the language we ordinarily use can have a significant effect on the way you try to solve problems.
-Scott L. Montgomery
Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.
-Hugh Miller
Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.
-Colin Powell
Science is the topography of ignorance.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
As subsurface explorationists, we are always keying off someone's dry hole. It should not make the prospect any less attractive because it happens to be your own dry hole.
-Jack Elam (Geologist)
Geoscientists are limited only by their imagination, innovation and determination. In the coming decades there will be tremendous strides made in petroleum geology, geophysics and petroleum engineering. The challenge for all of us – whether we are geologists, geophysicists, engineers, independent explorationists, or company or government explorationists – is to devise new concepts and skills to explore in areas considered to be out of the question or impossible.
-Michel T. Halbouty
Data from a discovery well, and from subsequent wells, should be
evaluated by a geologist, not a petroleum engineer.
-Robert J. Weimer
The stress placed on logical analysis in this discussion has perhaps obscured a parallel need for creative, constructive, innovative thought. Such thought does not in itself conflict with logic, but it can be impaired by standardization of methods no matter how logical the standardization appears to be. Innovative thought seeks to break from prior experience and gain insight, as often by forming new associations among familiar materials in nonstandard ways as by acquiring new data. We must prize the ability to recognize and use new relations among elements of knowledge, to form classifications that in the words of Wadell (1938) are not only broad and close but also so flexible and elastic that they can serve effectively to organize the novel or strange. This human attribute is essential to cope with a future whose only certain character is accelerating change.
-David J. Varnes
The fundamental point is simple: language matters. Language is the means by which any perception, discovery, or hypothesis acquires a solid and communicable reality. What this means, in turn, is that technical knowledge and its advance are never wholly separable from the forms used to give them an existence. Language and images can work upon the mind in many quiet, subtle ways—they can seem like part of the wallpaper, something we pass by every day without much notice, while actually comprising a crucial part of the architecture of our very ability to speak and conceive,
becoming more conscious of this architecture, its strengths and weaknesses, can be one avenue to enhanced creativity. Taking hold of the images that dominate in certain areas of science and engineering is one possible way to help understand, perhaps even to discover, new directions for thought and research.
-Scott L. Montgomery
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-Leonardo DaVinci
If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it
-Albert Einstein
The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.
-Louis Agassiz
The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
-Albert Einstein
