Loving the questions

Always looking for a good coda (though always "to be continued") for another semester of philosophy. This one's pretty good.

When I reach to the edge of the universe
I do so knowing that along some paths of cosmic discovery
There are times when, at least for now,
One must be content to love the questions themselves 

grandeur in this view of life

in the beginning

The latest "Symphony of Science"-

wave of reason

Bertrand Russell:
When you are studying any matter
Or considering any philosophy
Ask yourself only: what are the facts,
And what is the truth that the facts bear out

Carl Sagan:
Science is more than a body of knowledge
It's a way of thinking
A way of skeptically interrogating the universe

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions
To be skeptical of those in authority
Then we're up for grabs...

Carolyn Porco:
The same spiritual fulfillment
That people find in religion
Can be found in science
By coming to know, if you will, the mind of God...

Sagan:
Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries
With questions that were once treated only 
in religion and myth

The desire to be connected with the cosmos
Reflects a profound reality
But we are connected; not in the trivial ways
That Astrology promises, but in the deepest ways...

Russell:
Never let yourself be diverted 
By what you wish to believe
But look only and surely
At what are the facts



Symphony of Science

thin film of life

I love the coincident cosmopolitan serendipity of today's two FoL reports, converging as they did on Carl Sagan and Pale Blue Dot on our first day with Bill McKibben's Eaarth. Marie commented on Jeremy Rifkin's "empathic civilisation" and quoted the passage beginning: "There are places... where the natural world has all but disappeared." Our "thin film of life" is all we've got. Why do we fight over it so incessantly?


Then Jason played the Symphony of Science's "unbroken thread"... 





...heralding a more "glorious dawn."


Is there intelligent life on earth? Well, there was. Maybe there will be again, in the future.  


Or, maybe we should just say: there can be a future only if there is... only if we're still evolving.





P.S. I hunted for the Flaming Lips Bonnaroo video you said I'd like, Harrison, is this it? Guess you had to be there. But the Alan Watts "conversations" are unquestionably great.

Mars

unbroken thread

Will the thread remain unbroken? That's the great mystery the future poses. 

The secrets of evolution/Are time and death/There's an unbroken thread that stretches/From those first cells to us

The fourth installment in the Symphony of Science series, which I missed somehow back in January and February in my haste to discover "the poetry of reality": 

poetry of reality

The Poetry of Reality is the fifth installment in the Symphony of Science music video series. It features 12 scientists and science enthusiasts, including Michael Shermer, Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Carolyn Porco, and PZ Myers, promoting science through words of wisdom.

Special thanks are due to The Sagan Appreciation Society:http://www.youtube.com/user/SaganAppr...

and Connie Barlow:http://www.youtube.com/user/ghostsofe...


Check out http://symphonyofscience.com for more science music videos.