Science Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Vision, in Polanyi's framing, is less a camera than a plot machine. The eye "searches for shapes" not because the world is neatly outlined, but because perception is an active hunt for boundaries: figure versus ground, signal versus noise. Then he escalates from geometry to storytelling: a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's the tell. He's pointing to the mind's compulsion to turn raw data into a sequence with meaning, to prefer narrative coherence over faithful transcription.

Coming from a scientist, the line reads like a quiet warning about how discovery actually happens. In the lab, as in everyday life, we don't merely observe; we pattern-match. We draft hypotheses that smuggle in a beginning (a cause), a middle (a mechanism), and an end (a result). It's elegant because it's not anti-science; it's anti-naivete. Polanyi is acknowledging the human infrastructure underneath "objectivity": expectation, framing, the urge to close a loop.

The subtext is that interpretation can be both a tool and a trap. The same instinct that lets you spot a faint signal in messy measurements can also tempt you into seeing shapes that aren't there - overfitting, confirmation bias, the premature satisfaction of a clean storyline. In an era of dashboards, images, and models that beg to be read as destiny, his sentence lands as a cultural critique: we keep mistaking our appetite for narrative for evidence of truth. The eye wants an ending. Reality doesn't owe us one.