Barthes on significance

When a great many people agree that a problem is insignificant, that usually means it is not. Insignificance is the locus of true significance. This should never be forgotten.(Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, p. 177)

This is true across so many disciplines. Consider, for example, the state of physics in about 1900. That year, Lord Kelvin, one of the most eminent physicists of the nineteenth century, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ In the same year he told the Royal Institution that only two clouds remained to obscure the ‘beauty and clearness’ of Newtonian physics. One of the problems he dismissed as clouds led ultimately to relativity theory; the other to quantum theory. Together these new theories amounted to a revolution in our understanding of the physical world.