- #1
honestrosewater
Gold Member
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What do you guys think about when you look at the sky, sun, stars, other heavenly bodies? I think about lots of things: various connections to legend, literature, and science; what's out there that I can't see; which stars are still there; 'the stage is too big for the drama'; someone or something may be up there looking back at me, so I should probably put some clothes on; what do other people think about when they look at the sky; if I ask the question in GD will anyone give me a serious answer...
... which reminds me of something else:
I've been playing around with a poem comparing different fates of the universe to fates of men. Maybe some day I won't have to humanize these things to make them meaningful. Does an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia move any of you? I feel the wonder and amazement - what else am I missing?
... which reminds me of something else:
Has anyone's view of the Heavens changed as you've learned more about science (astronomers/cosmologists especially)? Do you now see less or more?Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.
- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
I've been playing around with a poem comparing different fates of the universe to fates of men. Maybe some day I won't have to humanize these things to make them meaningful. Does an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia move any of you? I feel the wonder and amazement - what else am I missing?