Monday, January 19, 2009

A Brief Dose of Hopeful Thinking

I've got to buy my own copy of Cosmos. I love that series more than is strictly healthy, and I totally wish I had a telescope--yeah, and a solid understanding of basic physics with which to appreciate the things I see, even on this Little Blue Rock. But I struggle with the concept of the periodic table of elements, let alone anything harder than that.

Meh, it's mostly mental laziness and lack of application on my part--and possibly lack of imagination on the part of my highschool science teacher.

I'm trying to look at it like this: I can't learn to fly by flapping my arms. I can't learn how to live backwards in time. I can't learn how to transfigure my body into a wooden chair.

I can learn to understand physics. And algebra. And quantum mechanics and String Theory and the plot of Solaris--anything any other person on this planet can learn. It may be a tough pill to swallow, but swallow I will. It may be a long time going down, but go down it will.

(Notice how many dirty jokes I could, but don't make about that last couple of sentences? A sign of how good my veneer of fake maturity is getting.)

I want to understand--not just know, but really understand, gut-deep, how everything works. I wanna read everything Carl Sagan's ever written, because he had the most accessible, cool personal style, and it comes across just as well in print as it does on screen.

I would like to learn to see everything through a scientist's eyes, because everything is science.

And, to quote one of my favorite science guys: "Science rules."



"If wishes was horses, we'd all be eatin' steak."--Jayne Cobb

4 comments:

  1. Science does rule. Wish I could make your thirst for scientific factual knowledge contagious. I can't imagine anything better that could happen to our species than to fall in love with facts, not spiritual fantasy.
    Thank you, and do continue to read and love science..please!

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  2. Wow--thank you, lol, for reading.

    I used to want to be a scientist when I was a kid. A paleontologist. But as I got older, my edge in math and science disappeared and I stuck with the things I was still good at, that still came easily. Art and writing, and to a slightly lesser extent history. I backed down from the kind of challenge that makes life zing and I'm only now starting to regret it. But at least I found that curiosity again. It was a near thing, and I didn't realize how two dimensional my life was without the kind of wonder that makes kids and scientists look at something and ask: "How does that work?"

    Hee, I couldn't stop reading now if I tried. Not until I know the how and why of everything :)

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  3. I've read more science in the past year than I had in the whole of my life previously. I guess I'm fortunate to live in an age when so many good scientists are also good communicators.

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  4. You said it--for me, Dawkins was the first, and since then, I've had the good fortune of either getting referred to, or stumbling across accessible books on science. I didn't even know such a thing existed, a year ago :D

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