If your primary goal is to succeed in the world, you may utilize science primarily to achieve academic success or pass tests, but if you want to understand nature better, you will study it for other reasons as well. Take a miniature globe, place a piece of black plaster over England, place a lit lamp in place of the sun, and gently rotate the globe so that it totally reflects the lamp's light. In reality, sunbeams are a series of small, fast waves that flow from the sun to us over an unseen medium known as "ether," constantly bombarding anything that gets in their path. In highly polished, reflective metal, waves barely ever penetrate at all but are instead projected out off the surface; as a result, objects like a steel knife or a silver spoon are extremely brilliant and easy to notice. Statuary yards are so named because they house the creations of sculptors who have carved statues from granite, marble, and other types of stone into a variety of diverse forms. However, at the workshop where the sculptor is working, you can see that he has managed to carve pictures that resemble live things out of rough stone blocks.