(no subject)
I bought a book called Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neil Postman... and while it isn't my favorite book, there are some excerpts that I enjoyed pondering:
"Einstein and his colleagues did not believe that words had 'essential' meanings. They understood that language was a social convention and that both its structure and its content were not necessarily useful in understanding the nature of reality. In his book The Meaning of Relativity, Einstein wrote, 'The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.' Indeed, the idea that we are, in a sense, imprisoned in a house of language is concisely expressed in Werner Heisenberg's famous remark that we do not see nature as it is but only as a consequence of the questions we put to it. We might add to this J.B.S Haldane's equally illuminating remark that the universe is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think."