Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
     Confucius (551-479 BCE)

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
     Ernest Renan (1823–1892)

Then would I hail the fleeting moment.
O stay - you are so fair!
     Faust's words

Science is to see what everyone else has not seen and think what no one else has thought.
     Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986)

Do you believe then that sciences would have arisen and become great if there had not been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after secret and forbidden powers?
     Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

A scientist studies nature not because it is useful; rather he studies it because it is a source of pleasure for him, because nature is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worthy of the effort that goes into knowing it, and life would not be worthy of the effort it takes to live it.
     Henri Poincaré (1854–1912)

Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns.
     John Clarke (1884–1963)

It is only when the cold season comes that we know the pine and the cypress tree to be evergreen.
     Chinese proverb

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
     T.S.Elliot (1888–1965)

Science is build up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a home.
     Henri Poincaré (1854–1912)

We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover what nature does or may be made to do.
     Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
     George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

When people will be taught not what they should think, but rather how they should think, all the troubles will vanish.
     Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
     Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

We should discuss some new studies whose results, because of their strange nature, we provide not without hesitation... We come to the conclusion that our 'radium isotopes' show the properties of barium... other elements are out of the question.
     O.Hahn and F.Strassman

Now I am almost sure that you have discovered decay into barium, and I consider this result beautiful indeed.
     L.Meitner

We cannot explain the observed effect in terms of presently known systematic uncertainties. Therefore, the measurement indicates an early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum.
     T.Adam et al.

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
     B.F.Skinner (1904–1990)

It must be a strange world not being a scientist, going through life not knowing - or maybe not caring - about where the air came from, and where the stars at night came from, or how far they are from us. I want to know.
     Michio Kaku

• implicit
• science and human civilization
  • the unchanging nature
  • knowledge is irreversible, a part of our culture
  • we have evolved
• science and art
  • our quest for beauty
  • regularity (pattern) vs. a fleeting momentary miracle
  • analysis vs. synthesis
  • profound art is grounded in science
  • profound science always involves a leap of imagination
  • the creative aspect
  • `getting' the joke
• science and technology
  • in awe of a microwave oven
  • a short road from science to application
    • Late evening, 21.12.1938 - Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman [Die Naturwissenschaften 27:11]
    • 05.01.1939 - Liese Meitner
    • 07.1939 - Albert Einstein writes a letter to Theodore Roosevelt
    • 02.12.1942 - Enrico Fermi
    • 16.07.1945 - Alamogordo, N.M. ("Trinity" test)
    • 06 and 09.08.1945 - Hiroshima and Nagasaki
  • a mere footnote... in awe of a scientific idea
  • 2011: neutrinos faster than the speed of light? [arXiv:1109.4897v1]
• science and you
  • inexhaustible
  • unpredictable
  • may appear confusing
  • spark of an idea
  • hold no preconceptions
  • question everything
  • think it through
• education