Such people, all contributors to a scientific upheaval, are of additional interest for the ways their works grew from their lives. They serve as good reminders that science itself, however precise and objective, is a human activity. It’s a way of wondering as well as a way of knowing. It’s a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like grandmaster chess, it’s something gloriously imperfect that people do. The smudgy fingerprints of our humanness are all over it.
