of my usual experiments: mixing things together to my heart’s content, or at least until something exploded. Meanwhile, my father walked by to see what I was doing and just then, sploosh! The concoction exploded, leaving a small hole in the bottom of his pants. Not only did my concoction dissolve fabric , but all of the wax on the floor, the wax that my family had worked so hard to remove, had now “disapparated.” That was the official start of my life as a scientist. Experiments were a near weekly
Darwin’s new understanding of the living universe depicts a world positively burgeoning with crawlers and creepers, swimmers and sweepers, plodders and hoppers, flyers and floaters, divers and flippers, hiders and nabbers, chasers and standers. Millions of life forms present trillions of ingenious living strategies. Even the humblest single-celled organism is endowed with a necessary sense of light and dark, warm and cool, up and down, wet and dry, bitter and sweet – and a repertoire of tactics and