On the importance of the right questions:
The trouble with trying to solve questions posed by communities is that all the good ones are gone, especially if they can be answered. Why then do not we see the scientists around us spend their nights hunting for questions? Instead, it seems that having a clear question is a scientist’s natural state of mind; after all, the storyline of almost every scientific paper starts with a clearly defined question and then proceeds directly to the answer. In reality, the way scientists retell their discoveries may reflect much more how humans communicate knowledge than how those discoveries were actually made.
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[If] a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown—the hallmark of night science.
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Why, then, does it not seem this way? Why do questions appear secondary to answers? It may be because a new question is so powerful that it transforms our reality. A new question tends to erase its own origin; it is hard to imagine that there ever was a time when the question was not there.
We are living in a world where answers seem ever easier to come by. But answers are only half the question.