There’s nothing like discovery (by M. Twain)

We have already spent some time discussing the emotional cocktail a scientist feels when making a discovery (the eureka moment). The great American writer Mark Twain also considered that making a discovery was one of the reasons why life was worth living. It is no coincidence that Twain also had a scientific bent: he was a close friend of Nikola Tesla, and it was not uncommon to see the writer in the scientist’s laboratory.

In one of his travel books, The innocents abroad, he recounted in his inimitable, ironic and irreverent prose a Mediterranean cruise he took in 1867. In Florence he visited Galileo’s first and second tombs: “We had seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great men, they had still let him rot there. That we had lived to see his dust in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of literati, and not to Florence or her rulers.”

But it is the matter of discovery that we are interested in here, and that is what he wrote about at the beginning of chapter XXVI:

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea –to discover a great thought– an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain – plow had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before any body else – these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.