Richard Feynman - about wine
“A poet once said: 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine'
- We will probably never know in what sense he meant it,
- for poets do not write to be understood.
- But it is true that, if we look at a glass of wine closely enough, we see the entire universe
- How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it!
There are the things of physics:
- the twisting liquid, which evaporates depending on the wind and weather,
- the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms,
- the glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and
- in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age and the evolution of stars.
What strange array of chemicals are in the wine?
- How did they come to be? There are:
--- the ferments,
--- the enzymes,
--- the substrates, and
--- the products
- Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine
--- without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease.
There in wine is found the great philosophical generalization:
- all life is fermentation.
If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts:
- physics,
- biology,
- geology,
- astronomy,
- psychology,
- and so on
-- remember that nature does not know it!
So let us put it all back together
- not forgetting ultimately what it is for.
- Let it give us one more final pleasure
- drink it and forget it all!”
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http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78268-a-poet-once-said-the-whole-universe-is-in-a
Richard Feynman’s Letter to His Departed Wife: “You, Dead, Are So Much Better Than Anyone Else Alive” (1946): http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/richard-feynmans-letter-to-departed-wife.html