The importance of small steps in science (and in life in general)

One day, when finishing up my dinner in a Chinese restaurant, I cracked open my fortuneteller cookie and what I read stroke me and reminded me a long-time forgotten lesson that my mother used to teach my sisters and me. My mother's saying was like "the little rivers make the great ones". The Chinese one was something like "great things are achieved by small steps". I was quite amazed how I failed to remember this lesson which sounds so modest and powerful in the same time. Life around you goes so fast that at times it pushes you to burn the essential steps; but then, you burn yourself before reaching your goal.

Thus, it is with pleasure that I would like to refresh our Confucius-like philosophy today and reminded us of the importance of such simple lesson. What motivated me is this lesson appeared also in one of Ludwig Boltzmann's essay, a very important physicist of the late 19th century. This concerns science only but it applies, as he shows, to everything in life:

"Nowhere less than in natural science does the proposition that the straight path is the shortest turn out to be true. If a general intends to conquer a hostile city, he will not consult his map for the shortest road leading there; rather he will be forced to make the most various detours, every hamlet, even if quite off the path, will become a valuable point of leverage for him, if only he can take it; impregnable places he will isolate. Likewise, the scientist asks not what are the currently most important questions, but «which are at present solvable?» or sometimes merely «in which can we make some small but genuine advance?». As long as the alchemist merely sought the philosopher's stone and aimed at finding the art of making gold, all their endeavours were fruitless; it was only when people restricted themselves to seemingly less valuable quesitons that they created chemistry. Thus natural science appears completely to lose from sight the large and general questions; but all the more splendide is the success when, groping in the thicket of special questions, we suddenly find a small opening that allows a hitherto undreamt of outlook on the whole"

Ludwig Boltzmann, The second law of thermodynamics, in Theoretical physics and philosophical problems