antet 2

How far can we go ?

"I suppose that if we would reach the edge of the world, we would find there somebody who is going beyond."

- Henry David Thoreau –

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"Through Giving You Shall Receive"

Find out who said this, see why he said it and, then, go beyond this starting point.



why ? (1)

www.sxc.hu
Why science should be retold (1)


Sometime ago I came across a text which described an image and that image remained in my mind for a long time.

That text was going like this:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

I'm very fond of that image, the image of the Explorer testing the infinity by playing and using to contemplate its immensity, which always lies in front of his eyes.

The boy in the text above is no other than Sir Isaac Newton, the man who revolutionized scientific thinking and the laws of physics around 300 years ago.

The next image that came into my mind after reading this text was a scene from „Contact” (1996, R: Robert Zemeckis), a sequence in which Dr. Eleanor Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) crosses the Universe by traveling through a wormhole. I am sure that those who saw the film remember it.

There is in that scene a genuine outpouring of cosmic objects: galaxies, quasars, stars, nebulae, cosmic clouds, etc, and the vision of these things gives Dr. Arroway the strangest and most mixed feelings: from surprise and delight to an admiration bordering almost on smothering.

Even though it could be said that the emotion of the character is a little bit exaggerated, there is actually nothing artificial there: facing the infinity can be nothing else but an extreme experiment for some ultra-tiny and very frail beings like the humans.

As we all know, we are not designed to accommodate and understand everything at a glance and perhaps that is why the best we can do is probably just to seek and gather small “smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary”  while contemplating quietly the mystery of the immensity which we can not comprehend.

(to be continued)