Knowledge is of great importance for our society, Nobody (or at least not so many) would doubt it any more. Techniques have made knowledge easily accessible to more and more people, just as some said before:"The techniques possibly make a fool of this generation more knowledgeable than genius of last generation"
But knowledge doesn't come from nothing. Here come the researchers, often at the frontiers of knowledge, providing original new data or new perspectives of our world.
People often forget that behind those 'cold' data/theories, there exist the researchers with beating hearts. There are not so many places where a researcher could post his/her opinion about researches themselves, or unfortunately, not every researcher is necessarily a good writer at the same time.
Of course, time has left us with some of sparkling masterpieces, a nice written book or research paper or device. J.M. Ziman's book "Principles of the Theory of Solids" is of course of this kind. Even from its preface, you can learn so much about his opinion on writing/acquiring scientific knowledge. He was aiming to write a book full of ideas, instead of a collection of facts or complex formulas, which would distract the readers away from the science's hard core. Isn't it the very lack of many scientific publications?
Anyway, I invite you with the preface of this true researcher, and hope it is inspiring for you as well.
---Lei, @Delft
Link to the Preface of J.M. Ziman's book
The link from the publisher is broken, you may search online about this book's preface, it is worth to read.
