Wonder of the Natural World

Sun's nature as revealed by modern science far more wonderful: no mere angels or gold coin, but an enormous sphere into which a million Earths could be packed, in the core of which the hidden nuclei of atoms are being jammed together, hydrogen transfigured into helium, the energy latent in hydrogen for billions of years released, the Earth and other planets warmed and lit thereby, and the same process repeated four hundred billion times elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy?

The blueprints, detailed instructions, and job orders for building you from scratch would fill about 1,000 encyclopedia volumes if written out in English. Yet every cell in your body has a set of these encyclopedias. A quasar is so far away that the light we see from it began its intergalactic voyage before the Earth was formed. Every person on Earth is descended from the same not-quite-human ancestors in East Africa a few million years ago, making us all cousins.

Whenever I think about any of these discoveries, I feel a tingle of exhilaration. My heart races. I can't help it. Science is an astonishment and a delight. Every time a spacecraft flies by a new world, I find myself amazed. Planetary scientists ask themselves: 'Oh, is that the way it is? Why didn't we think of that?' But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine. Given our manifest human limitations, what is surprising is that we have been able to penetrate so far into the secrets of Nature.

Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discovery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science - pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake - is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what's been discovered lately.

Scientific explanations are so much more enchanting than supernatural.