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Dear Einstein, Do Scientists Pray?
A young girl named Phyllis wrote to Einstein in 1936 on behalf of her Sunday School class, asking if scientists pray. He wrote her back.
An excerpt from his response (read the whole letter here):
… everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
To me, he is capturing that intangible feeling of curiosity and discovery combined. That the awareness that our world is ruled by natural laws is a constant “spirit” in itself, and one that we can access at will. Maybe not traditional religion, but an idea that I think we can all agree is worth exploring.
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"Chemists tend to think in terms of molecules rather than elements in much the way that writers tend to think in term of words and not letters."
- Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything (via therikeone) -
Drawings of the Large Hadron Collider in the style of Leonardo da Vinci
Drawn by CERN physicist Dr. Sergio Cittolin. A whole bunch more are available here.
Previously: A collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical art, some of our first modern medical illustrations.
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"It is impossible to avail oneself of the scientific spirit if one is not in a position, at every moment of thinking life, to reconstruct the whole of one’s knowledge."
- Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (via thepovertyoftheory) -
"A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, 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. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the 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 arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! 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!"
- Richard Feynman (via crookedindifference)(Source: en.wikiquote.org)
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Try as we might to invent a reasonable theory that can explain how a photon “makes up its mind” whether to go through glass or bounce back, it is impossible to predict which way a photon will go.
Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don’t always produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will collapse. Here is a circumstance—identical photons are always coming down in the same direction to the same piece of glass—that produces different results.
"-Richard Feynman [in QED: the strange theory of light and matter]
He continues with:
“We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That’s a retreat, but that’s the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed.”
(via blindmen6)
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“Maybe someday we’ll answer the most difficult question of all: How does the human brain give rise to consciousness? Who is this “I” within me that illuminates one tiny corner of the universe, while the rest of the cosmos rolls on indifferent to every human concern? A question that comes perilously close to theology…” - V.S. Ramachandran
Its quite tragic, that most of us are too busy with our every day lives to stop and contemplate on the question of our existence. The very thought that we are aware of ourselves and our place in the cosmos is absolutely thrilling. And I believe that this is one of the main reasons to why neuroscience is such a significant branch of study. It has the potential to answer the hard question of consciousness, regarding how unconsious matter can give rise to it in the first place.
Consequently, some scientists suggest that the mind (Whatever it may be) is the very function of the human brain as a whole. But how this mind has come to be is still a mystery.
Throughout history, mankind has tried to answer this mind-bending question through myths and dogmas when no other explanation was available. But now we are beginning to think rationally and starting to use the scientific and technological tools available to us in order to attain a well-reasoned answer. At this very moment, hundreds of thousands of neuroscientists are mapping the human brain and scrutinizing it, aiming to unravel its mysteries. Perhaps one day, we will figure out why it is that this “I” exists at all.
(Source: ici-marie)
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"It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious."
- Stephen Hawking (via rayax)(Source: expose-the-light)
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"The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain."
-Tom Stafford, writing about the anxiety surrounding brain attention spans in the age of the internet.
In short, everything you do changes your brain in some way. It’s better to approach these new cognitive challenges with an even keel, and not through the lens of technophobia.
A must read for fans of the brain and the internet, which you all clearly are (or else you wouldn’t be reading this).
BBC Future - Does the internet rewire your brain?
(via jtotheizzoe) -
"As I began to think about it, I realized that, contrary to popular view, scientists don’t really care that much about facts. We recognize that facts are the most unreliable part of the whole operation. They don’t last, they’re always under revision. Whatever fact you seemed to have uncovered is likely to be revised by the next generation. That’s the difference between science and many other endeavors. Science revels in revision. For science, revision is a victory. In religion, or astrology, or any other belief system, revision is a kind of defeat. You were supposed to have known the answer to this. But the joy of science is that it’s about revision."
-Stuart Firestein, author of ‘Ignorance,’
In his new book, Stuart Firestein makes the case that what drives scientific exploration is a sort of informed ignorance. Not the ignorance of the dimwitted, but the realization that we are driven by the excitement of being on the edge of knowledge, of constantly revising what is known, and that our endeavors are those who venture into the dark instead of describing simply what we see.
(via The Daily Beast)
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