LEARNING LIBERTY AND THE POWER OF PRINCIPLESIt is never possible to know beforehand or with full certainty whether the right ideas will win out in a particular place and at any particular time.
In The Constitution of Liberty, free-market economist and social philosopher F.A. Hayek quotes in a footnote the famous nineteenth-century scientist Louis Pasteur: “In research, chance only helps those whose minds are well prepared for it.” What Pasteur was, no doubt, getting at is that unless the researcher already has been trained in the principles and methods of his own scientific field, and unless he is fairly knowledgeable about previous experiments and their outcomes in his area of study, he will not be able to see possibilities or opportunities for discovery that come his way that otherwise would just pass by the untrained mind.
