What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our eyes!

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

 

was a German scientist, satirist and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumous notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books",^[1] and for his discovery of the strange treelike patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.