Science Quote by Robert B. Laughlin

A Nobel-winning physicist admitting he starts by not doing the reading sounds like heresy in an era that treats expertise as a kind of scripture. Laughlin’s line is a quiet provocation: he’s defending ignorance, but only the strategic kind. The “insist” matters. This isn’t laziness; it’s discipline, a self-imposed blindfold meant to keep his mind from being colonized by the standard story. In research culture, “the literature” can become a fence as much as a foundation, training young scientists to optimize for correctness rather than discovery.

The subtext is about power and permission. By beginning “without reading up,” Laughlin claims the right to approach a problem as if it’s still alive, not already adjudicated by consensus. That stance is easier to romanticize when you’re established; the trouble he mentions is real. Science punishes reinvention, and careers can die on the accusation that you “didn’t do your homework.” So the confession doubles as critique of a system that rewards citation fluency while quietly discouraging conceptual risk.

His payoff phrase - “see things my predecessors have missed” - gestures at how breakthroughs often arrive: not from more information, but from different framing. It’s an argument for first principles as an ethical posture, not just a method. Start from the beginning, and you may stumble into old errors. Start from the beginning, and you might also notice that the emperor’s equations have no clothes.