Every day, the search engine Google posts a new graphic version, or "doodle," of its company logo. For January 11, it's a colorful stratigraphic version of "Google" to mark the birthday of Nicolaus Steno in 1638. Steno (the Latinized version of Nils Stensen) was the first person to derive some of the most basic conceptual tools that geologists use in reading the rocks, and for that reason he's commonly considered the "father of geology."
As a youth in Denmark, Steno set out to master the knowledge of his day with a rigorous skeptical streak, relying as much as possible on what he could confirm himself. His early journal, the "Chaos" notebook, first translated in 1997, gives much detail from that period. He first became one of Europe's foremost anatomists (Steno's duct, which drains the parotid salivary gland, was his discovery), then wrote on other topics including geology. He converted to Catholicism in 1667 and became a priest, ceasing his published research, in 1675.
Steno was also famous for this maxim: "Pulchra sunt, quae videntur, pulchiora, quae sciuntur, longe pulcherrima, quae ignorantur." One translation is, "Beautiful is what we see; more beautiful is what we understand; most beautiful by far is what we are ignorant of." He explained it at an anatomical lecture in Copenhagen in 1673, where he was about to dissect the cadaver of a young woman: "Beautiful is what directly is revealed to the senses without dissection. More beautiful is what the dissection draws forth from the hidden interior parts. But far most beautiful—although escaping the senses—is what can be approached through reasoning about what the senses have already perceived" (Jens Hansen, in GSA Memoir 203, doi 10.1130/2009.1202(12), p. 164). It has been argued that Steno abandoned science when he converted, because this maxim could be stretched to suggest reliance on faith. But beyond the fact that Steno continued publishing his research as a Catholic, this explanation confirms him as a true scientific thinker in an age when such a thing was quite rare.
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