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A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake. Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many…
In the very largest way of looking at planet Earth's socioeconomic-evolution events, we must observe that humans are designed with legs and not roots. Yesterday, humanity developed temporary roots as it cultivated its life-support food root-grown on the land. The metals made possible metal canning of food and…
I vow to practice my profession with conscience and dignity; I will strive to apply my skills only with the utmost respect for the well-being of humanity, the earth, and all its species; I will not permit considerations of nationality, politics, prejudice, or material advancement to intervene between my work and this…
There is no dictionary word for an army of invisible giants, one thousand miles tall, with their arms interlinked, girding the planet Earth. Since there exists just such an invisible, abstract, legal-contrivance army of giants, we have invented the word GRUNCH as the group designation--"a grunch of giants." GR-UN-C-H…
When individuals shunt the comprehensive cosmic regeneration into exclusive advantaging of only their own survival and enjoyment and succeed in prolonged local short-circuiting of cosmic regenerativity, they disqualify the invention "human" as a reliable function of regenerative Universe. They are just as…
Humanity is an experimental initiative of Universe. The experiment is to discover whether the complex of cosmic laws can maintain the integrity of eternal regeneration while allowing the mind of the species homo sapiens on the little planet Earth to discover and use some of the mathematical laws governing the design…
What kinds of memes are there? I've divided memes into three classes: distinctions, knives used to slice up reality; strategies, beliefs about which causes will produce which effects; and associations, attitudes about everything in life. Each class of meme works to program you in a different way. [...]…
Pelorat said, "You know what that reminds me of? -Pardon me, Bliss, for interrupting, but it so fits that I can't resist telling you right now before I forget. There's an old creation myth I once came across; a myth in which life was formed on a planet and consisted of only a limited assortment of species, just those…
From the cold garden, you run into the house, and find the fire laid indeed in the grate, but the wood dead and the coals black, waiting to be lighted. You strike a match, and soon there is a blazing fire. Where does the heat come from? Why do the coals burn and give out a glowing light? Have you not read of gnomes…
The harder we look at the border between life and non-life, the more elusive does the distinction become. Life, the animate, was supposed to have some sort of vibrant, throbbing quality, some vital essence - made to sound yet more mysterious when dropped into French: elan vital. Life, it seemed, was made of a special…
A scientific theorum has not been - cannot be - proved in the way a mathematical theorem is proved. But common sense treats it as a fact in the same sense as the 'theory' that the Earth is round and not flat is a fact, and the theory that green plants obtain energy from the sun is a fact. All are scientific theorums…
Sun's nature as revealed by modern science far more wonderful: no mere angels or gold coin, but an enormous sphere into which a million Earths could be packed, in the core of which the hidden nuclei of atoms are being jammed together, hydrogen transfigured into helium, the energy latent in hydrogen for billions of…
The 1939 New York World's Fair - that so transfixed me as a small visitor from darkest Brooklyn - was about 'The World of Tomorrow'. Merely by adopting such a motif, it promised that there would be a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939. Although the…
For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be…
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something…
To discover that the Universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover…
The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know. to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the…
Rationalism is more than a movement of thought which realized itself at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. It is a necessary phenomenon in all normal spiritual life. All real progress in the world is in the last analysis produced by rationalism. The principle, which was then…
I do not think that truth becomes more primitive if we pursue it to simpler facts. For no fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field—a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that…
Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as New¬ ton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern…