Everyone wants to come up with something new and call it his own. It's easier to be proud of yourself when you can say "I did this completely on my own" than to acknowledge that you were indeed helped. But such a statement is not only arrogant, it's simply false.
It may come as a surprise to some that the founder of modern science as we know it was humble enough to admit that he was merely a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants ("nanos gigantum humeris insidentes"). Isaac Newton understood that he could never have discovered those laws of physics that came to be a defining moment in scientific history by himself. Yet sadly, scientists of the common era want to stand on his shoulders when it comes to his scientific discovery, but would rather step down when it comes to his belief in God. And thus they are reduced to midgets.
Toward the end of his life he said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I appear to have been but a little boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smooth pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Acknowledging his smallness, he became a giant upon whose shoulders we can stand and see much, much farther.
It may come as a surprise to some that the founder of modern science as we know it was humble enough to admit that he was merely a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants ("nanos gigantum humeris insidentes"). Isaac Newton understood that he could never have discovered those laws of physics that came to be a defining moment in scientific history by himself. Yet sadly, scientists of the common era want to stand on his shoulders when it comes to his scientific discovery, but would rather step down when it comes to his belief in God. And thus they are reduced to midgets.
Toward the end of his life he said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I appear to have been but a little boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smooth pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Acknowledging his smallness, he became a giant upon whose shoulders we can stand and see much, much farther.
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