“There’s nothing so tragic as the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
I was prowling the internet last night looking for pictures from the Hubble telescope in some effort to appease the latent astronomer in me, and between this and trying to find journals on why human beings value music, I was reminded how much it annoys me when people rebuke scientific efforts on their having no real "point" to them. Ignoring the countless discoveries made by "pointless" experiments, or those found simply by accident (penicillin, anyone?), the fact of the matter is that, well, who cares? What on earth is wrong with learning something just for the sake of learning it?
People go on and on about the faults of human beings, and very rarely look at our merits. And to me, one of our greatest merits is our simple hunger for knowledge for knowledge's sake. There's no point, no particular aim in mind for the receipt of this knowledge, just the hunger and the willingness to know it. In a way, I think this is the purest form of science: not that knowledge sought so that it may be applied, but that which is sought because it is interesting, or, perhaps more importantly, because it is beautiful. I have never understood people who say that beauty can only be found in art, in faith, in love - whatever - but never in facts, because for me personally facts - that is, science - far surpasses these things on sheer aesthetics. (And neverminding the fact that these things are in themselves products of science, just like everything else.) I'm not religious in any way, but the closest I ever get to feeling spiritual is when I discover something especially interesting about the world, or when I see a photograph - such as these I'm about to show you - that really brings to light how very small and unimportant humankind is. I know that a lot - probably most - people find this being humbled deeply discomforting, this realisation that we are nothing but a blink of light in the universe, that one day we will cease to exist and the universe will continue quite happily without us just as it did before us. But I find it comforting. There's also a certain sadness that I'm never going to know even the barest amount of all the things I want to know, that I'm never going to see any of these beautiful things that I want to, but it's more melancholy than depression. The vastness of existence is comforting in the way that it sort of... puts things into perspective. We're an incredibly narrow-minded species, as are all species, but what makes us special as an animal is those individuals that try and reach further than that, and show us that which is outside of our natural perception.
So when people complain that something is "useless" and why aren't we spending this money on something "useful" like "curing cancer" (it's always cancer, neverminding the fact that cancer is a whole slew of genetic diseases, each with its own aetiology and progression, and there's no such thing as a single cure for it...), I assume that they must be lacking something so fundamentally human that I will never be able to see eye to eye with them, or understand them.
And because I'm not very articulate and don't know how to end this...
(Link: hubblesite.org)
(Looking at these, how anyone can believe there isn't other intelligent life out there is beyond me. It is the height of egocentricity.)
People go on and on about the faults of human beings, and very rarely look at our merits. And to me, one of our greatest merits is our simple hunger for knowledge for knowledge's sake. There's no point, no particular aim in mind for the receipt of this knowledge, just the hunger and the willingness to know it. In a way, I think this is the purest form of science: not that knowledge sought so that it may be applied, but that which is sought because it is interesting, or, perhaps more importantly, because it is beautiful. I have never understood people who say that beauty can only be found in art, in faith, in love - whatever - but never in facts, because for me personally facts - that is, science - far surpasses these things on sheer aesthetics. (And neverminding the fact that these things are in themselves products of science, just like everything else.) I'm not religious in any way, but the closest I ever get to feeling spiritual is when I discover something especially interesting about the world, or when I see a photograph - such as these I'm about to show you - that really brings to light how very small and unimportant humankind is. I know that a lot - probably most - people find this being humbled deeply discomforting, this realisation that we are nothing but a blink of light in the universe, that one day we will cease to exist and the universe will continue quite happily without us just as it did before us. But I find it comforting. There's also a certain sadness that I'm never going to know even the barest amount of all the things I want to know, that I'm never going to see any of these beautiful things that I want to, but it's more melancholy than depression. The vastness of existence is comforting in the way that it sort of... puts things into perspective. We're an incredibly narrow-minded species, as are all species, but what makes us special as an animal is those individuals that try and reach further than that, and show us that which is outside of our natural perception.
So when people complain that something is "useless" and why aren't we spending this money on something "useful" like "curing cancer" (it's always cancer, neverminding the fact that cancer is a whole slew of genetic diseases, each with its own aetiology and progression, and there's no such thing as a single cure for it...), I assume that they must be lacking something so fundamentally human that I will never be able to see eye to eye with them, or understand them.
And because I'm not very articulate and don't know how to end this...
(Link: hubblesite.org)
(Looking at these, how anyone can believe there isn't other intelligent life out there is beyond me. It is the height of egocentricity.)