nature was much more inventive

Space scientist Edward Stone served as project scientist for NASA’s Voyager missions for 50 years, as well as playing a major role in many other missions, acting as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and running his own lab at Caltech.
Stone has died, aged 88.
Here are some remarkable quotes from “Celebrating Voyager’s 40 Years in Space with Ed Stone” a youtube video | 4 min watch, from 2017)

I think time after time we just found that nature was much more inventive than our models.

(3min49)

Usually, it’s the things that we don’t anticipate which turn out to be the most important.

(3min58)