I longed for the old days when something new and fundamental could be teased from nature by a single mind and a single pair of hands. I began compiling a list that became a book: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, is as pure as the lines of a Greek statue. These are not necessarily stories of great discoveries - serendipitous surprises such as Galileo's spying of Jupiter's moons or Charles Darwin's observations about finches.