This feeling of grandeur, the immutability of nature’s laws, and of how they might prove graspable by us if we sufficiently sought them—this came to me overwhelmingly when I was a boy of ten, standing before the periodic table in the Science Museum in South Kensington. It has never left me, and fifty years later it is undimmed. My faith and life were set at that moment; my Pisgah, my Sinai, came in a museum.
