There is a really amazing profile in last weeks New Yorker about a neuroscientist named Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (unfortunately the full text of the article is only available to subscribers). One of the things that struck me about the piece is how Ramachandran described why he found science so fascinating:
In his early teens, Ramachandran began conducting experiments in chemistry and biology in a makeshift laboratory under the staircase in the family’s house in Bangkok, where his father was stationed. He also read books on the history of science and was struck by the role of intuition and play in many important discoveries: Galileo adapting a child’s spyglass and discovering the moons of Jupiter, which led him to challenge the geocentric model of the universe; Faraday tinkering with a magnet and coil and discovering electromagnetism. Rahamchandran often recounts these anecdotes to his students. “These stories are inspirational and fun,” he told me. “But they’re also telling you about how to do science.”
I’ve been telling everyone I see to read this article since I finished it a few days ago and have been thinking non-stop (I wrote a a little more about it and him at my personal blog). It struck me over the weekend that part of our big goal of making science cool needs to be to bring back the kind of magic Ramachandran describes. While experimentation and data is a huge aspect, intuition and curiosity can play an equally large role.