In short, an excellent read.
Eye opening quote:
“In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, few would remain, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside.
If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. Now let us have a look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? No single answer will cover, escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.
Man tries to make for himself, in the fashion that suits him best, a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in tbe narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
The supreme task is to arrive at those laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.”
-Albert Einstein
Albert knew something. That something may be called by some “natural law” or “phenomenology.” Something that authors such as Nassim Taleb frequently write about. That thing is the know that you don’t know something.
“The scientific method only tells you where you’ve been, not where to go”
-Robert Persig
You have to care to know where to go, and I mean really care. Care in the way which Persig calls “quality.” Care in the way the Christians refer to as the image of god.
Recently there’s been quite a bit of debate about preventative options for popular sicknesses. Most propaganda to push such options is touted as “caring.” It’s hard to believe that these people care so much about life when the same number of people die each year from Tuberculosis on a global scale. They’ve been dying for years and tuberculosis is relatively cheap as easy to overcome. Nobody knows or cares since they’re not told to.
You have to care, and I mean really care.