#johnswort

Science is simply a long and careful look beneath and beyond the world's skin. In the same field where I see only a muddle of anonymous green, Henry David Thoreau, scientist of Walden Pond, saw infinite variety: cotton grass, foxtail, life-everlasting, goldenrod, Saint Johnswort, mullein, meadowsweet. An astronomer sees a sky far richer than mine, filled with quasars and pulsars, galaxies and nebulas. In all that bickering at the bird feeder, an ornithologist sees pair bonds and pecking order. In that annoying rock dug out of the strawberry patch, a geologist sees grey granite left in the 10,000-year-old path of glaciers. This new depth of seeing has taken us from the beetles in our own back yards to the particles inside the atom and the gaseous glow at the end of the universe.