Quote of the Day: Surprised by the Simple

From the book that my class is reading for today:

This is a surprising discovery, though the facts are entirely obvious to us. It is important to learn to be surprised by simple things -- for example, by the fact that bodies fall down, not up, and that they fall at a certain rate; that if pushed, they move on a flat surface in a straight line, not a circle; and so on. The beginning of science is the recognition that the simplest phenomena of ordinary life raise quite serious problems: Why are they as they are, instead of some different way?

-- Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge, p. 43