01101001
Or in more colloquial terms “Hi.”
I want to ask you to consider a question. A question that’s been on my mind for quite some time. A question that often plagues me. What I will ask you to consider is “Have we lost the ability to wonder at our world?”
I opened with the binary code for “H” followed by that for “I”. The 8 digit binary code is the way computers… think. For want of a better word. More specifically they think in terms of on and off. On is when an electrical current is passing through a circuit and off is when one is not, 1 and 0 respectively. So for a computer to think of the word “Hi” it needs to reduce it to 16 different states of on and off. Granted it does this in 1 millionth of a second but the point remains that the word “Hi” is reduced it to an elementary system.
This is where our curiosity as humans has brought us.
You remember how at one time in your childhood you wondered how something worked. You looked at the radio and said how does the music come out of it. Those of us with a more reckless spirit often wound up with the radio in pieces at our feet non the wiser but a great deal more fearful of when dad got home. Somehow it never fitted back together again the way it came apart. There was always one piece extra when you were finished.
This curiosity has driven us to explore our world. We have become so adept at opening things up, dissecting, investigating and reducing to component parts, almost everything seems to make sense. If not directly to us, we feel comforted by the fact that it makes sense to someone out there. Very little fills us with wonder.
Have we lost the ability to stand in wonder of our world?
1221 AD. Soren Bjornson has just stepped off his boat. His Viking army’s raid on the northern shores of Scotland was a great success and he’s returned to Hålogaland with a hoard of pillage. As he’s disembarking he sees the sky light up in a band of green fire. The billows of luminescence roll across the horizon. He looks up with fear and wonder knowing that the lights are the flashes off the Valkyries armor who had been riding with them and Odin is demonstrating his approval by granting him such an entourage. Soren feels connected, his wonder makes him feel part of something.
767 or so years into the future. Magunus Kvande is crossing the street to the local Strabucks in
Tromsa to get himself a low-caf-double-froth-single-pump-hold-the-cinnamon-mochachino. The light in the street has a green tinge about it and he glances up to see the Aurora Borealis. The northern lights dance across the sky. Magnus has seen it before. He looks up and remembers back to his physics 101 lecture at Oslo university. The solar wind pushes out bursts of electron’s, which burn against the troposphere up here near the poles where the magnetosphere doesn’t deflect them as much causing the ionization of the oxygen particles hence the green glow. The little bell on the door dings politely as he enters the coffee shop not missing a step.
Who had the richer experience? The Viking, caked in dry blood, holding his war axe, staring up at something he didn’t understand or the physics student, glibly sipping on his warm, comforting beverage?
As we dissect things and reduce them to their component parts in our world, we gain remarkable insight to how the world works. We develop fantastic tools that simplify our lives. We further our understanding of ourselves and extend our lifespan by decades. We also become overconfident in our knowledge. We become blasé. We become glib. We lose the wonder at how our world works.
As a teacher I see this all the time. The underlying common attitude of the children is one of nonchalance. Nothing amazes them anymore. They’ve seen it all. They know that if they don’t understand exactly how it works, it’s ok, science can explain it. There’s nothing, really, that we don’t have a handle on.
That’s when I like to throw them a curve ball and tell them that according to the maths involved with quantum physics the direction of time is arbitrary. In other words there is no real distinction in the positive as opposed to the negative direction of time. There is no reason, quantum-ly, why something that will happen 5 minutes from now has any less effect on this moment than something that happened 5 minutes ago.
Then you see it. The small ember of wonder briefly sparks in their eyes.
So have we lost it? Have we lost the ability to wonder at our world? I never said I would answer the question for you. I said I would simply pose it.
In the beginning there was but a word
as in the end there will be but a silence.
In the beginning there was but belief
as in the end there will be but science.
When we have unraveled the world
and torn the fabric to see how it works,
when we have pierced the essence
and bared the soul to see what there lurks.
Might that we find god and so rejoice
or find nothing and be faced with the choice
of believing all said but knowing it false
or believing none said and knowing naught else.
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