When I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished - for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.

The discipline, nonetheless, is exacting: everything that can be observed should be observed, even if it is only recalled as the bland background from which the intriguing bits pop out like Venus in the evening sky. The goal is always finding something new, hopefully unimagined and, better still, hitherto unimaginable.

We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.

What the ocean was to the child, the Periodic Table is to the chemist.

When I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished - for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.