It is about taking huge risks. It is about wasting time, getting burned, and failing. It is like trying to crack a monstrous safe that has a complicated, secret lock designed by God. Some of God's safes are harder to open than others. The questions may be so difficult to answer, the safe so hard to crack, that you may spend a lifetime playing the tumblers and finally die with the door still firmly locked.
Science is therefore about obsession.
Sometimes there is a faint clicking sound, and the door pulls wide open, and you walk in.