The virtues (and folly) of science and scholarship: learning merits its laurels, but to what ends, if life (and self-knowledge) is neglected? “Envy, curiosity, and a sense of the imperfection of our present state, incline us to estimate the advantages which are in the possession of others above their real value. Every one must have remarked, [...]
An encounter with Renaissance art, and its consequence: Boris Pasternak reflects on culture and individual genius. The chief thing that everyone carries away from an encounter with Italian art is the sensation of the tangible unity of our culture, whatever he may have seen this in, and whatever name he may give it. How much [...]
Science, religion, and truth: Rabindranath Tagore speaking with Albert Einstein, Berlin 1930: Truth, which is one with the universal being, must be essentially human; otherwise, whatever we individuals realize as true, never can be called truth. At least, the truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic—in [...]
A scientist reads the book of life, without annotations, but through imagery To read the book of life can be a great delight and an edifying experience; but only if one abstains from decorating every page with annotations in the margins and with corrections, and, even more importantly, from tearing them out and throwing [...]
Did Newton practice junk science? A journalist takes issue with Newton's preoccupation with alchemy. As she puts it: ... Newton was super into alchemy, a medieval "science" that preceded chemistry. Practitioners believed it was possible to transform one metal into another. The ultimate goal was figuring out how to transform lead into gold, and the elusive [...]
Nature, time, and self-discovery: a physicist speaks about the mysteries of our lives, hearkening to Lucretius: Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore -- where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere -- is not something that estranges us [...]
Critical reason and the life of the unconscious: at what expense to our lives do we refine our reason, especially when it comes to understanding crucial matters of life and death? A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some [...]
Where it's at: or better, where "at" (@) has been. What is modern is ancient, if we should notice. From the article: "The earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one. It features in a 1345 Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ [...]
Wise fools and foolish wits: what experience should teach us, if we would learn from it: "To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing: we must learn that we are fools, a far broader and more important lesson." Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience"
Computers transform our knowledge of the past. According to the author, computerized quantitative analysis offers insights that traditional historical study cannot. From the article: Huge swathes of our past are slowly but surely getting digitised as old books and scanned and organised. It stands to reason that surely once the historians get to work it [...]
