https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXMjCnKwb4 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXMjCnKwb4> subtitled "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder" He starts with John Keats' well-known, light-hearted accusation that Isaac Newton (it was Theodoric of Freiberg who discovered rainbows were prismatic) destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. And then shows the reader that science, not be feared as a sort of cosmological wet blanket ,does not destroy, but rather discovers poetry in the patterns of nature
"[I]sn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?" Beautiful his opening lines a kind of rise above anaesthetic of familiarity: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?" "There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways." "The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite." "The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedfellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be." > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long sharelong60@ wrote: > > > > salyavin, I like weird ideas too. Even better, something you said once, about the truth being even more wondrous than fiction or scifi or something like that. What's a good example? Well even just bird migration is pretty amazing. Or how they fly in formation. So right, no need to know about faeries to find the garden beautiful. But knowing how different flowers bloom at just the right time to get just the right amount of sun and moisture they need--now that is something that can make the garden look even more beautiful, IMHO (-: > > > Indeed. Animal migration is amazing. and the Monarch buttefly that flies from Mexico to somewhere in north America, but it takes so > long they stop and breed, then die and their offspring continue > the journey. Or the animals in Africa that have been doing the > same route for so long the follow a path that isn't straight > because the continenents have shifted, or is it that there have > been earthquakes or an ice age? Can't remember offhand.... > > If you dig the world of nature I recommend a Richard Dawkins book > like The Ancestors Tale or The Greatest Show On Earth, or *any* of > his non-religious natural history books, he really is one of the > best communicators of this stuff ever and his books are always full > of astounding factoids about nature. > > Actually his book Unweaving The Rainbow should be read by a lot of > people here because he reveals what's really amazing about crystals > etc, and how much superior reality is compared to the tedious new > age myths that develop round things. > > Would find a link to a review or two but my computer is overheating > and needs to be repaired before my fingernails melt! >
