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.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
What we want is scientists who don't become part of the policy discussion: All they do is produce science. If someone becomes an advocate, then I won't pay as much attention to their science.
Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.
What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations
We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.
The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating; how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.
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