Importance of Leisure in Science

Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson's enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Notes:

Folksonomies: science culture discovery

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/art and entertainment/books and literature (0.576702)
/law, govt and politics/government (0.575268)

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The Cosmic Perspective

Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Tyson, Niel DeGrasse (April 2, 2007), The Cosmic Perspective, Retrieved on 2015-03-02

Source Material [www.haydenplanetarium.org]

Folksonomies: science culture astronomy perspective