ABSTRACT
Great researchers are those who, while necessarily working within available resources and conditions, succeed in thinking beyond their time and place, imagining beyond current knowledge, breaking boundaries and genuinely moving knowledge forward. Copernicus’ contribution was that he used data, mathematical measurements from the simple instruments available at the time, to give quantitative substantiation to this idea. This in effect created a new, measurement-based argument for an old, theoretical idea. Galileo Galilei, working almost a hundred years after Copernicus, made many discoveries in mathematics, motion, physics and astronomy. Nettie Stevens was an American geneticist at a time when this branch of science was just beginning. Michael Polanyi was a chemist and philosopher of science who delved deeply into the nature of knowledge and the role of the knower. He critiqued positivism as giving a false account of knowing as being external, factual and provable only.
