There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the beauty of science as a tool for understanding the natural world through inquiry.
Margaret Geller emphasizes the inherent beauty in science, illustrating how humans possess the unique ability to ask profound questions about the universe and find answers through inquiry and exploration. By creating models of nature, we can deepen our understanding of its workings, showcasing the power of scientific investigation and the human capacity for curiosity and comprehension.
In practice
During a science presentation, I quoted Margaret Geller to inspire students about the importance of asking questions.
Hunger, inadequate medical care, poor housing, and inferior schools are enemies of the sense of wonder. It is easier and less expensive in the long run to prevent a loss of imagination by providing adequate nutrition, housing, medical care, and schooling than it is to try to restore that loss.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.
In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.
The sciences throw an inexpressible grace over our compositions, even where they are not immediately concerned; as their effects are discernible where we least expect to find them.
Life ... is a relationship between molecules.
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