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.
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
The ride to orbit was impressive, as it always is. But once I got on board the space station, it really felt like I was visiting an old home; it felt very comfortable.
You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.
The universe will finally become a ball of radiation, becoming more and more rarified and passing into longer and longer wave-lengths. The longest waves of radiation are Hertzian waves of the kind used in broadcasting. About every 1500 million years this ball of radio waves will double in diameter; and it will go on expanding in geometrical progression for ever. Perhaps then I may describe the end of the physical world as-one stupendous broadcast.
If we are to define science, ... it does not consist so much in knowing, nor even in "organized knowledge," as it does in diligent inquiry into truth for truth's sake, without any sort of axe to grind, nor for the sake of the delight of contemplating it, but from an impulse to penetrate into the reason of things.
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
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