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I write essays frequently to gather my thoughts. I will add more when I get a chance to rewrite my old essays or when I find the time to write new ones.
In
Love with the Universe My essays are usually rational critiques of society, and like any critique, they tend to have a negative quality about them. I decided, this time, to write a list of the things I love in nature and science. It is not a comprehensive list because I am in love with all the universe, even though it doesn't reciprocate the love very often. I write those critiques because I love all of these things. I care about what we do to the many things I love. As it turns out, the only thing I don't love is human ignorance, ignorance about the universe and ourselves. This ignorance harms the objects of my affections so I write against it. I do not write them because I am angry or bitter. I write them because I care. I write because I am in love with the world and hope to share the love with others. I love the sound of the wind in the trees, the chirps, squeals, and songs of birds. I love the deep greenness of nature, wildflowers floating on delicate stems in the breeze, flashing storm clouds on the horizon, a great meteor shower, an undisturbed rambling creek, and a beautiful scattered ceiling of stars and planets. I love the powerful feelings I get when understanding some deep and profound principle of nature. I love the feel of a green carpet of wild clovers on my bare feet and the wind in my hair. I love the warmth of the sun and the way a green glowing tree canopy sends chutes of light to the earth and sometimes makes little round pinhole camera images of the sun. I love puppies, the way they wiggle and leap to be closer to my face, longing for nothing so much as to be close to me. I love their warm little body in my arms. I love playing with my little niece, watching how her eyes absorb every detail and property of the world like an artist/scientist, and how all children look on the world, like a god newly born, with curiosity, honesty, and wonder but without prejudice or ignorant posturings. I love the laughter of children, the greatest symbol that all is well and that we will continue. I love that children tend to transcend their parents, take what they offer and grow upon it, in way that over long timescales produces a movement toward greater moral enlightenment. I love that no matter how bad things may seem at the moment, over the long-term humanity always progresses in understanding and compassion. Think about how slavery, which was once widely accepted, has been almost completely eradicated around the world in a matter of decades. I love that we can study human behavior scientifically and notice which behaviors are unreasonable and harmful in us, and attempt to behave in more rational and compassionate ways. I love a warm touch, a soft kiss, a long embrace, a pat on the back, a gentle smile, a kind word, and the feel of a beating heart. I love romantic love, even when it's painful. I love farming, the closeness to the land, the way the land is cared for, tended to, and used to do the very thing that suits it best, the altruistic nature of it, feeding the world, and the amber waves of grain and the land all come to life each season. I love all living things and the bittersweet cycles of life and death. I love that all living things with DNA share one common ancestor. I love that I am surrounded by my family wherever I roam. My cousins are humans, worms, butterflies, trees, plankton, blue whales, lions, bacteria, serpents, dogs, elephants, beetles, blades of grass, ants, apes, birds, etc. in species and variations of those species that are so numerous that none of us will ever have the privilege of looking upon them all, so many cousins we can never hope to know even a fraction of them. I love that the planet is smothered in life, in almost every nook and cranny of the surface. From deep caves and ocean trenches to mountaintops there is some form of life that has adapted to it. I love that a single drop of pond water often has a vast microscopic zoo of strange and wonderful life forms. I love water in general - as icicles, snow, a waterfall, a raging river, a rocky shore, a crisp ocean horizon, and a great medium for developing and sustaining life. I love how life struggles to stay alive and how it always finds new ways to adapt. I love the intricate little bodies of insects and the elegant bodies and flight of birds that swim in the ocean of air. I love the brilliant inner workings of organisms, how colonies of specialized single-celled organisms work in unison to support multi-cellular organisms like us. I love that we have such an amazing fossil record, considering that the process requires some very special conditions. I love that "higher" social animals developed compassion that extends beyond their offspring, and that despite the greedy, uncaring tendency of the vestigial, lower brain, these animals can suppress those primitive urges. I love the fact that many constants in nature are perfectly suited to create conditions for life, suggesting that there might well be infinite other worlds, that the process that made our universe probably made many others. I love that much of the matter in our solar system was created by an exploding star or stars that created all of the heavy atoms like carbon which were essential for life on the planet. We are made of matter that was created in the atomic fusion reactions that power stars. That matter journeyed unimaginable distances to make up our bodies. I love that most of the matter that makes up our body is constantly replaced so that in a few years we are no longer made of the same matter. We are literally not who we were. We melt into the world and it melts into us - a seamless, undivided whole. I love the fact that the numbers of atoms just moving around the surface of the planet is so great that there is a high probability that I just breathed in a nitrogen atom that Beethoven once breathed or an oxygen atom that once ran through the bloodstream of a great dinosaur. This is the case because single breathful draws in many more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. I love all the beautiful symmetries of nature both visual and mathematical like crystals and biological symmetries or the symmetry of physical equations. I love that energy is neither created nor destroyed but simply transformed. I love that when matter is destroyed it releases a tremendous amount of energy according to an elegant equation whose only other factor consists of the speed of light, demonstrating a central relationship between the most important quantities in the universe. I love that scientists have managed to turn energy into matter, essentially making matter from nothing. I love that the total energy of the universe appears to be zero. I love that scientists have shown that the matter that makes up the moon came from Earth in a violent meteor collision and that giant Jupiter, with its high gravity, was able to draw in most of the debris flying dangerously around the solar system so that we could be here. I love the fact that the universe has a comprehensible order. If it were simply chaotic, there could be no forces, matter, or energy, and therefore, no one to comprehend it. I love that the sun provides almost all the energy for the planet; that even things like oil and coal are just sunlight's energy that had been trapped in plants and living things, which after millions of years of heat and pressure became a temporary and imperfect source of energy for humankind. I love that we have figured out how our solar system formed from a spinning cloud of dust and gas and how the sun produces energy by nuclear fusion. I love that we can now identify other stars with planetary systems. I love that light from the galaxy closest to us, Andromeda, which can be seen with the naked eye, traveled for 2.5 million years to reach my eye, that I am looking back into time the further out I look in the universe. The sun we see is the sun from 8 minutes ago and if some star went supernova (exploded) in our own galaxy, The Milky Way, we will not know for anywhere from 4 years to 90,000 years. I love that all electromagnetic waves, including visible light, are created by the motion of electric charge, usually electrons, and that some of these waves, like radio waves, are passing through everything that doesn't have a lot of free electrons, like us. I love that white light is a combination of all the colors we enjoy in the visible spectrum and can be split and recombined, that all the colors are an aspect of one color, white light. I love the way the sun refracts in the droplets of airborne water to spread its light into a circular rainbow whose center is exactly opposite the sun with respect to our eye. I love the fact that individual wave packets of light, or photons, can interfere with themselves. The amazing and beautiful implication that light is not a particle but a wave while in flight, that propagates in many directions at once, and only behaves like a particle when its energy is transferred to one point when it interacts with matter. I love that all the matter in the universe shares this wave aspect. Even protons can be made to interfere with themselves, just like a wave on the surface of a lake. I love that when light enters refractive media like a glass lens, the invisible wave front slows down, much like a water wave front entering a shallower pool, and that this has to do with the rapid absorption and emission of light in the medium. I love Einstein's thought experiment that shows how, from the perspective of light in a vacuum, the universe has already happened, all of time has already passed and that measurements of time and space are only relative to the observer. I love the overwhelming multitude of structures and forms in the universe. I love the deep unifying principles in the forces of nature. I love that everything we know in the universe has a cause, that there is a chain of causality between events, nothing happens at random though it may seem chaotic to our eyes. I love how physics explains all the complexity in the world through just a handful of forces, how the overwhelming variety of phenomena are just different aspects of a few principles. I love all the unities that show us that things we once thought were separate are actually just different manifestations of the same thing. For example, magnetism and the electric force are just manifestations of one force called the electromagnetic force, or that the same force that pulls an apple to the ground also keeps the Earth in orbit about the Sun. Incidentally, this force also makes bodies of significant mass round and keeps our atmosphere from leaking into space. It is very possible that all the "individual things" in the world are just different manifestations of one "thing". I love how James Clerk Maxwell used well-established mathematics to figure out that electromagnetic disturbances must always travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. I love that in each new discovery in the mind of a scientist/explorer the universe has effectively learned something new about itself. I love that chaotic systems can lead to stable systems at another scale, and vice versa. Consider the chaotic collisions of gas molecules at the atomic scale that at a macroscopic scale where a trillion trillion gas molecules are colliding with each other produces a constant pressure against the container walls. I love the fact that humanity has walked on the moon and sent probes into the outer solar system and roved the surface of Mars. I love that understanding something does not decrease the beauty of it by removing some mystery but rather makes one realize the deep connections between all things in a way that is more beautiful than mystery, that the interconnectedness brings us together and removes a fear of the unknown. I love that we can we study ourselves and know our own weaknesses. I love that the world is free. We have only the forces of nature and our own lack of imagination to limit us. I love that we have no gods to grovel beneath and nothing to blame for the cruelty of nature except unsentient, unfeeling forces and ignorance. I love the fact that a visiting extra-terrestrial would be very unimpressed by our Moses, Apollo, Jesus, Vishnu, Allah, Yahweh, Krishna, and our psychics, ghosts, and tarot cards, but would be fascinated to know about our Einstein, our Galileo, our Newton, our scientific understanding of the universe and ourselves. Our careful observations of reality and appreciation of its beauty are one of the few things we would have in common with such beings. I love that when we die, we rest, we lose all worry, all pain and suffering, all guilt and shame, all identity, and melt back into the beautiful world from which we've come. I love that the matter of our body rots and becomes food for tiny colonies of animals, who are devoured by other animals, who carry our matter far and wide and turn it into fertilizer for countless blades of grass, wildflowers, and trees that dwarf every living thing, that this matter is blown by wind and carried by currents of water and that after a long time our body is indistinguishable from all the Earth and a constant participant in the circle of life. I love that the only way to persist in the memory of humankind in any positive way is to live with greatness, reason, responsibility, and compassion, which is so easy to do in a world with so much to understand and love. I love that even as precious as life is, the fact that we all must die makes it even more precious, profoundly so, and that every moment should be spent doing the very things that suit us best and enrich our experience the most. I love that we don't have to just survive this life to live a better one in some afterlife, but that we get the privilege to be alive once and make the most of it. I love that, even though the universe may not have an intrinsic meaning, we have our own meanings, our own cares, desires, awe and wonder, our own concerns about the things we love. I love that out of all the nearly infinite combinations of genetic variation that could have taken place, we are the lucky ones in a lottery that's beyond compare. We get to breathe the salty air of the breezy shore, feel the pangs and distress of love, and hear the sweet singing voice of a young child. I love that there is always more to know or to change about what we think we know. I love that there is a great history of human scientific achievement that profoundly marks, step-by-step, the universe's comprehension of itself. I love that scientists are taught not to worship what is known but to question it, to doubt every facet of what is presented to them. I love that there is an impressive way of knowing the world that relies on no ancient myths but rather carefully probes the nature of reality with great honesty and elegant experiments, that embraces change and rewards those who alter even our most cherished concepts. I love the fact that we are a way for the universe to know itself. Most of all, I love the people who notice these things and open the eyes of the world. I love the people who create, who discover new things in nature, and rebel against the popular ignorance of our species.
For I so love the world, that I gave my only begotten self [to it]. Whoever uses his reason will not fear death, but shall become one with all the world and take part in its eternal life. |
| Robert Rodgers- Artist ¥ Scientist ¥ Writer - Copyright © 2005
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