Si tu aimes un fleur qui se trouve dans une étoile, c’est doux, la nuit, de regarder le ciel. Toutes les étoiles sont fleuries. (If you love a flower found on a star, it is sweet at night to look at the heavens. All the stars are blooming.)

–The Little Prince

“Le Petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I picked up this copy in my Richmond neighborhood’s second-hand bookshop for $3. Now let’s see how much high school French I remember….

In my PhD defense presentation, I quoted from just one book: The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The quotation I used wasn’t picked for scientific content — the story isn’t known for scientific accuracy, after all — but I was thinking about the setting again when the Rosetta probe reached Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko last week. After all, the Little Prince lives on…