Okay - I just love this.
watch it again and again until you are gradually sucked into the black hole created by the collision of youtube and science
Or something like that.
The real story is pretty interesting and points out that our human quest to understand and appreciate our world continues. Click here to go to one official site with reasonably intelligible explanations of this stuff. Frankly it is all pretty complicated and I am probably only getting one fact in ten - but wow. How cool is this stuff.
The main reporting around this story has been the creation of microscopic black holes that will eventually do us in. I think this is in part a reaction to the complexity and abstract nature of the work being done. But at least we understand what black holes look like because we have watched Star Trek and other similar shows/movies over the years.
But that is not what the main story is here. The main story is the phenomenally complex and amazing universe of things that we can't see and don't know about. Since it is so hard to understand, and so complicated, it can become cumbersome and get in the way of appreciating what we are trying to understand. One answer, according to Arthur Zajonc, is the ancient practice of contemplation. Click here to go to a podcast of his ideas.
Science, as an image, implies a lab full of test tubes or a book or some other such tangible thing. And yet, really most of science is thinking and questioning and being full of wonder.
Ultimately we are all beings of wonder. Whether we are religious, spiritual, or atheist we wonder about our world. And this story reminds us of what connects all of us: our world, our universe, and our small place in it. In a divisive time it is good to hold onto that truth.
Peace and Wonder to you all.
K
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Great video, Kirsty--put a nice wrap on subatomic physics--pun absolutely intended.
I kept wondering where you would go with this and you went to wondering. Yet when you say we are all creatures of wonder, it is not the verb form I think of. It is a wonder that we exist, that we care about these questions, that we have cared about them so long that they form the bases of our oldest myths, that there is such amazing and beautiful and terrifying diversity in life, and so on and on.
Indeed, I was walking west on 24th Ave. in Calgary approaching Crowchild Trail about 15 years ago when I found myself thinking "Religion is all about wonder, about how we appoach the vast unkown. If we see it as nothing more than a problem to be solved, we are missing the religious perspective. If we can see it as a thing of awe and can appreciate both the challenge of understanding and the apparent infinity of the yet-to-be-understood, then we can approach life with a better sense of our own place in it--a place we can revel in."
OK, I didn't think exactly that, but you get the idea.
Bill
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