On the psychology of scientific creativity

A.B. Migdal (L.D. Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics; USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow), Contemporary Physics, 20(2): 121-48, 1979

…”The driving force behind scientific creativity should not be the desire to bring about a scientific revolution; nor should all one’s efforts be directed towards achieving success, but one should be motivated by a love of knowledge, a capacity to wonder at and delight in each small success and, above all, a feeling for the beauty of science. It is important to develop impeccable conscientiousness and to learn to reduce the most complex questions to extreme simplicity and clarity; to find a way out of many psychological contradictions; to be guided by intuition but not to put one’s trust in it; to be conscious of all the difficulties, but to be able temporarily to divert one’s attention from them; to believe in a result but at the same time to search patiently for a way to refute it; to find one’s own style of working but to be able to change it with experience and with each new major discovery: in brief one must aim to understand everything.”