Nature & Animals Quote by Robert Barany

The sting here is in the phrase "even such an obvious idea" - a scientist’s version of an eye-roll, sharpened into an indictment. Barany isn’t merely correcting a colleague; he’s diagnosing a failure of imagination that looks, in retrospect, almost absurd. The sentence is built like a courtroom brief: the missed experiment is simple (observe or rotate an animal), the oversight is glaring, and the aggravating detail is damning - the researcher already ran "numerous vertigo experiments with human subjects" and "made frequent use of animal experiments". The tools were on the table. The question just never got asked.

Barany, a pioneer of vestibular research, is writing from inside an early 20th-century scientific world where vertigo was becoming legible as physiology rather than mysticism. His intent is disciplinary: to mark the boundary between productive rigor and mere busywork. The subtext is about scientific attention - how a field can generate lots of data while missing the most direct test because of habit, hierarchy, or conceptual blinders. It's also a subtle critique of methodological inconsistency: if animals are acceptable instruments in general, why exempt them precisely where they could resolve a key mechanism?

The line works because it makes ignorance feel active, not accidental. "Did not occur to him" is an accusation aimed at the mind, not the lab bench. Barany turns a small omission into a parable about how science stalls: not from lack of experiments, but from the wrong kinds of curiosity.