how sensible it all seems, how crew-cut and with enough
anaesthetic to k.o. an elephant - outside the laboratories
the populists in whatever guise march on - as with any
congregation, atheists also muster up enough social muscle:
they too have their bouncers and other
gob-smackers with knuckle dusters -
as long as science is popularised it pushes
the boundaries of insensible chasms elsewhere -
but with so futile popularisation:
shortages in respective sectors: mandatory,
or as suggested: no longer rich bachelors and
private laboratories - a science of regurgitation -
once they burned heretics, now the subtle
championing of mingy sedatives - and since
Joan of Arc's heart no longer aspires to passion
and its all consuming fire, it turns into a wet
piece of coal - reining in the crowds of pop culture
zombies - said before, said again - but how
dislodged the feelings not ranging into absurdity
or at least nibbling on the zest of Dionysus;
but how things changed from that year, 2006,
everyone is asking, the poncy pope with glamorous
attire, the stiff-necked scientists - the pendulum
of guilt swinging in both directions - half of
the 20th century prescribed a fear magnanimously:
oddly enough - as implying: we forgive your
puny religious swooning and answering with
the easiest answers possible... here's a bomb -
so who are the sacred ones? they too are human -
the magazine dissected into:
a. what is reality? (can we be sure that the world
we experience is not just a figment of our
imagination) by roger penrose
b. do we have free will? (the more we find
out about the brain works, the less room there
seems to be for personal choice or responsibility)
by patricia churchland
c. what is life? (if we encounter alien life,
chances are we wouldn't recognise it - not even
if it was here on earth) by robert hazen
d. is the universe deterministic?
(however you look at it, the answer seems to be "maybe")
by vlatko vedral
e. what is consciousness? ("my soul is a hidden
orchestra... all i hear is the music" - fernando pessoa)
by paul brooks
f. will we ever have a theory of everything?
(2000 years of rational inquiry may be approaching
their crowning glory. just one more push could
be enough...)
by michio kaku
g. what happens after you die? (we have all
wondered if there is an afterlife, but only a few are brave -
or foolish - enough to try and find out)
by mary roach
h. what comes after **** sapiens?
(all species are fated either to die out or to evolve
into something else. all except humans, that is)
by james hughes -
so there we have it - the respective pillars of science,
whereby science replaces core beliefs into
core questions - to not hold firm, but to constantly
sway - the 8 founding questions - no more,
no less - but how many people can perpetually sway?
the supposed 8 universals, i.e. that every human
being might, might not, will or will not ask -
and for these 8 universals, exponential functions
of particulars: because that's how it's supposed
to be: chaotically democratic -
thus everyone knows the objectivity standard:
at its core is awe, outside the core pathology and
apathy - or let us say: passions and indifference -
then subdivisions of (+) and (-), and in general:
however it is you feel: compensated or left starving.
in 2006, they congregated at a round table and
spoke god-this, god-that - no minority report,
cold evidence never went down with women (or
so i'm told), three questions, question 1:
should science do away with religion?
oddly enough R. Dawkins said:
"no doubt there are many people who do need
religion, and far be it from me to pull the rug from
under their feet." - we know that the bestseller
the god delusion came out shortly after.
a physicist (S. Weinberg) similarly (c me la ri lee):
"science can't provide a sense of magic about the world,
or a community of fellow-believers. there's a
religious mentality that yearns for that."
L. Krauss: the success of science does not encompass
the entirety of human intellectual experience.
on and on this goes - i guess they have to debate for
the sake of debate - as i am sure everyone is aware:
a debate can overpower the point of prayer -
confessions? i treat it more like poetry - but in saying
that... where is the medical profession in all of this?
we have astronomers, ecologists, biologists,
physicists, astrophysicists, planetary scientists,
cosmologists, philosophers... what's the odd one out?
it's a bit suspicious that this magazine does not
cite any chemists... and that's ****** obvious...
they're the ones making pacts with the devil -
whether Goethe's or Marlowe's Faust -
then at least to the more obscure rendition
of Pan Twardowski (Herr Tvardovsky) -
but how odd it already is that chemists haven't
joined ranks with other scientists in their little
Friday night debating club meetings - seriously?
are those boffins serious about all of this?
or as one said it:
i came from learning to write CO for carbon monoxide,
and FeO for ferric oxide - or drawing electron migration
diagrams when two compounds interact (a nice
playground of symbols) and went my way into
some form of linguistics - primarily working on
the tetragrammaton - i have no major interest
beyond this definition: would i debate the most
difficult metaphysical assumption of the omni-variations
in terms of ascribing the variations to a being?
i'd stumble in the metaphysical world on omnipresence,
meaning i would be a pantheist - meaning god
would be anything and everything from the moon,
a mouse, an ant colony, my **** and what not -
the all-in-one: for one thing, that's already much
too hellish to comprehend, let alone make comedy from.
but they haven't told you about the painkilling
saliva that beats morphine - catherine rougeo:
proceedings of the national academy of sciences,
vol. 103, p. 17979) - the compound's name? opiorphin,
or the scourge of Afghanistan. they also didn't
tell you about Saracen sabres - their scimitars contained
carbon nanotubes - forged from Indian steel
called wootz - 17th century examples studied by
P. Paufler (Dresden) found the carbon nanotubes
and even nanowires (nature, vol. 444, p. 286) -
or is this becoming to look very much like traffic
on London's M25 during rush-hour? it certainly is,
as was intended -
1950s: age of optimism -
influenza wave from the east, the indestructible transistor,
television without wires, baby computer the size of
a piano, rubber windshields, genetic chemistry,
atomic aircraft, the neutrino, sputnik 1, strontium-90
(radioactive ash) used by manufacturers of woven
and knitted fabrics to overcome fog markings,
the coleopter, polypropylene (the remnants of German
word-compounding revealed in chemistry, and
only in chemistry, elsewhere compounding is
replaced by hyphenation, i.e. hyphenating),
and so on and so forth until present day -
passing through Sir, Julian, Huxley, who reinvented
****** with "positive" eugenics - oh sure, it was still
alive and kicking - quark hunters draw a blank -
i could reference all else that was involved
in making the last 60 years - beyond that people are
call it ancient history - or are Virgil and as Horace,
and as Ovid did - turned their back to the world,
into their poplar groves and jasmine filled gardens,
and said: ta'oh! ta'oh! Tao!
but not until then, before embarking i'm already
dreading to embark with something to add, to even
voice this - but i guess i might:
as ever, the freedom of speech is never as grand a
luxury as the freedom to think.
