Beautiful quote

Marie Curie, from a 1933 interview:

“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.”

The word that earns its weight here is “child.” Not naive—Curie was the most accomplished experimental physicist of her generation, the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She knew exactly how technically demanding the work was. The child she is describing is not ignorant; the child is impressed. The child looks at the thing and feels the strangeness of it before reaching for the explanation.

That capacity—to remain genuinely surprised by phenomena you have studied for years—is what separates scientists who discover from scientists who catalog. It is what you lose when expertise calcifies into routine. You stop asking why the thing behaves as it does and start assuming you already know.

The same quality matters in engineering, though we rarely talk about it in these terms. The most effective technical people we have worked alongside shared something: they had not lost the habit of looking at their systems with fresh attention. They noticed anomalies. They asked why. They were, in Curie’s sense, children in front of something that still impressed them.

The industrial framing of technical work—optimize, deliver, close tickets—does not leave much room for being impressed. The fairy tale requires a moment of stillness that sprints rarely permit.

That is worth pushing back against.