Simply
Amazing Science
What
This Blog is About
*
In
a 1959 essay, the British scientist C. P. Snow published an
influential essay in which he commented as follows:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
“I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
Not
a day passes when I do not discover one or more fascinating things
about the world and the universe. Some people need drugs to send
them upwards into a high, but I do not. I can get as high as I wish
to be simply by studying and contemplating the world around us. I
realized a short while ago that what interests me might interest
thousands of people across the world, and so I decided to start this
science blog.
I
am not a scientist. My actual work in science is limited to a year
or two of working for a medical testing laboratory, where I had the
chance to peruse hundreds of highly specialized research articles.
And much of my adult life has been spent studying a soft science,
anthropology. Yet I have always been fascinated by science and have
read continuously about various aspects of it.
While
I am not on a mission to educate the world, I want to share much that I have learned. In its own way, the Gauguin painting at the head of this blog may well symbolize our concerns, for surely it evokes man's wonder at the mystery of the universe. Let us go together on this voyage, you and I. Who knows what we'll discover ? But we can be sure that the journey
will be a great and fascinating one.
* Gauguin—after vowing that he would commit suicide following this painting's completion, something he had previously attempted—indicated that the painting should be read from right to left, with the three major figure groups illustrating the questions posed in the title. The three women with a child represent the beginning of life; the middle group symbolizes the daily existence of young adulthood; and in the final group, according to the artist, "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts"; at her feet, "a strange white bird...represents the futility of words." The blue idol in the background apparently represents what Gauguin described as "the Beyond." [From Wikipedia]
* Gauguin—after vowing that he would commit suicide following this painting's completion, something he had previously attempted—indicated that the painting should be read from right to left, with the three major figure groups illustrating the questions posed in the title. The three women with a child represent the beginning of life; the middle group symbolizes the daily existence of young adulthood; and in the final group, according to the artist, "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts"; at her feet, "a strange white bird...represents the futility of words." The blue idol in the background apparently represents what Gauguin described as "the Beyond." [From Wikipedia]
