The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein
Ideas and Opinions, New York: Crown, 1954.
(quoted in Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, New York: Random House, 1995.)
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Back when I was a blogging greenhorn, right about this time last year, an evangelical YEC thought he had come up with an intellectual coup de grâce to make me see "the light"; "Antony Flew believes in a god, so there." (Ok, so I'm paraphrasing just a bit) Chalk it up to ignorance, but I had never…
I've read more books than I think I can remember during 2007; the new bookshelves I obtained this past fall are now buckling underneath the weight of the accumulated mass and the volumes that keep are seemingly without a home. Some books I've been meaning to get to for some time and haven't read,…
As was evidenced by the long list of books that I've read this year, I've taken in a lot of material, and picking the 10 best books is a bit of a challenge. What makes a good technical book doesn't make a good popular science book, but overall there were a few that stood out from the rest to become…
There is a triple theme here, circling around cabinets of curiosity, which I'll get around to eventually. How about a picture first.
Frontispiece from Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities
But first. A few days ago we linked to a site on the "Longest Running Scientific…