I wish I could meet Keats or Blake to persuade them that mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved. Quite the contrary. The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle, and anyway the solution uncovers deeper mystery. The rainbow's dissection into light of different wavelengths leads on to Maxwell's equations, and eventually to special relativity.

Einstein himself was openly ruled by an aesthetic scientific muse: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science", he said. It's hard to find a modern particle physicist who doesn't own to some such aesthetic motivation. Typical is John Wheeler, one of the distinguished elder statesmen of American physics today:

" . . . we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say each to the other, 'Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!'"

Now, here's an apparent confusion: T H Huxley saw science as "nothing but trained and organized common sense", while Professor Lewis Wolpert insists that it's deeply paradoxical and surprising, an affront to commonsense rather than an extension of it. Every time you drink a glass of water, you are probably imbibing at least one atom that passed through the bladder of Aristotle. A tantalisingly surprising result, but it follows by Huxley-style organized common sense from Wolpert's observation that "there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea".

Science runs the gamut from the tantalisingly surprising to the deeply strange, and ideas don't come any stranger than Quantum Mechanics. More than one physicist has said something like: "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory."