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George Wald made considerable progress in our understanding of the chemistry and physiology of vision (which just so happens to be the area I find myself in now). He won the Nobel Prize (physiology or medicine) in 1967, and his lecture in Stockholm opened with a beautiful description of experimental science:
I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer; then one asks the next question, and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that one has only to listen.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
