“I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.” [Emerson, 1840]
“Knowledge is our destiny,” said Bronowski [1973], and sometimes I am similarly goaloriented in expressing my motivation toward science: I accumulate facts in hopes of finding understanding; I accumulate understandings in hopes of finding wisdom. Certainly these are aspects of my drive for living science, but perhaps the ends are merely a justification for the means. I think that Joseph Campbell [1988a] perceived a deeper obsession in his parable of the ‘motivation’ of the grass in a lawn:
The grass grows, and yet every week or so a human comes along and ruthlessly mows it, annihilating all of the week’s progress. Does the grass think, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, I give up!” Of course not. For the mower, as for the mown, it goes on, toward ends unknown.
“It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. ‘For my part,’ Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. . . The great affair is to move.’ . . . It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” [Ackerman, 1990]
[Image removed for copyright reasons] (Wikisource contributor note)
Those who are living science love the process of science -- the unique synergy of control and freedom, of skepticism and innovation. They love to use all of the scientific methods and try to dodge their pitfalls. Only rarely does the lightning flash of insight course through them, more often they feel the satisfaction of a successfully diagnostic experiment, and daily they overcome minor hurdles.
At times, when I lived in Alaska, the brightness of the night sky kept me awake. Last night, its darkness did the same. How can the night sky be dark? If the universe is infinite, then shouldn’t it be uniformly bright, lit by an infinite number of stars in every direction? This ‘dark-sky paradox’ has puzzled astronomers for more than a century, and it has been ‘solved’ more than a dozen times [Gleick, 1992a]. The modern solution begins by reminding us that what we see in the night sky is the photons currently reaching our eyes, recording events that happened on different stars lightyears ago. And how far back in time can we see? No farther than the 12 billion-yearago big-bang origin of the universe. Stars more than 12 billion light-years away are invisible to us today, because the light hasn’t reached us yet. It goes on, toward ends unknown.
