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Essays
These are deeper discussions on humanity, science, philosophy and the incredible mind.
The Lair of Creativity
The Lair of Creativity
The object of your greatest fascination, that which you ignited at Inspiration Point is here uncovered in all its essence and secret workings together with all the independent forces acting on it arrayed and identified, as well as those it acts upon. It’s more beautiful than you had imagined, and the possibilities for freeing it to its limitless potential are here before you, crystallizing in your mind. Instantly new thoughts flow like a current. Ideas emerge and are sifted. New connections are made, new ways of seeing something very specific, as if with a new lens. Patterns which were beyond perception are revealed. They have been ripped from the ether and harnessed to your will, like a wild cerebral mustang broken.
Bursting into existence in a sudden explosion of bright prismatic spray illuminating the darkness of the night; creativity comes. Unannounced and arriving at the speed of thought from nowhere there is penetrating insight, quickened understanding, revealed wisdom, fantastic invention or perhaps the delicate blueprint for crafting unsurpassed beauty. Invisible, creativity’s sudden, powerful and welcome presence is a warm rhapsody of sublime glorious splendor. Of all enlightenment, creativity is the greatest granted to us.
If we have a higher purpose, it lies in the transformative breakthroughs, chiseled sculpture-like through pure imagination by the highly creative whose fantastic, unexpected and perhaps miraculous insights better mankind.
Achieving not through sweat of toil, but through the fevered perspiration of inspiration, rising over the dust of everyday, eyes piercing into the bright horizon with steadfast confidence, cuts the figure of a great creator. Guided by uncanny acuity and limitless curiosity, persevering beyond fear and doubt and endowed with a rare brand of persistent courage he challenges himself; always. Master (by belief alone) of a domain in his world-internal and so specifically equipped and uniquely purposed in that realm, he frees himself from the weight of external expectation and sets about the great adventure of pursuing his prey: high creativity.
Requiring neither status or position, wealth or power, youth or experience, creativity lies waiting but secreted in its lair. Yet that secret held rests tantalizingly knowable by any so willingly inclined and firmly resolved to overcome all demons set about to guard against its discovery. Guarded yes, as a prisoner waiting to be freed from the captivity of the yet unimagined by the first adventurer to, with insight and aplomb, so dare to unleash what had been unknown.
Paradoxical indeed is this thing, to wrest into existence that which was unknown: to be a Creator. To orchestrate this indiscrete assembly of new-found patterns leading to perception. Unshackled and independent of temporal conditions in all the temporal senses, high creativity exists freely but unveils itself only to those who can reach its lair. What is thought? Truth? We strive for insight. Where is this intangible lair of creativity? How can it be reached? How does one travel to a destination that is not a place or a time?
The foundational talent is learning how to formulate the possible, rather than restricting the mind to the known. To imagine what might be and to see it done. While this pursuit of creativity will employ tools passed down through time such as induction and extrapolation, in his mind’s hands the creative fashions these and others uniquely to his specific purpose, twisting and shaping them into fine-tuned implements of discovery beyond their original design in order to aid his journey into the unknown.
A rare breed of man filled with curiosity and imbued with other critical characteristics including an agile mind and adventuresome spirit might choose to brave the invisible forces arrayed against him and undertake the ethereal voyage whose destination is creation. In exceptionally profound moments of heightened perception when the quest has been a consuming, driving passion and fate favors in time by granting that eureka moment, the world is changed through the sheer force of the creative’s mind. In turn these creators are reborn as transformative immortal figures: great men of the Age, remembered through time. Could you join their number?
You’ve always asked why, why not and how. Not when or where or how much. Nimble minded and a quick study, you find joy in exercising the playful gymnastics of your mind and summoning the penetrating calculus of destroying perceived limits. What if?
Of other traits, clearly unflinching independent thought is required, for your mind alone is your fiefdom, where all your assets are marshaled. When the time arrives further along the journey, you will enter the Vortex of Confusion - unaccompanied.
Derivative of self-absurdness and independent thought is courage, vital to overcoming fear and more specifically, doubt. Fear of how your life might change with a breakthrough should it come as well as fear of endeavoring valiantly yet ultimately resolving unrequited: returning on thy shield. Fear of gossip and ridicule and contempt: that of doubt traveling with you from the onset of adventure.
Is the dream first, or is it the spark of curiosity that first summons the dream that spawns the wave of conscious thought that births the evolving mission of creating? From dreaming then to simple speculation and through fury and fire onto the climactic triumph of creative achievement, the mind envelops the fragmented particles of thought and begins to assemble the puzzle pieces. Emerging relentlessly above the seemingly unending stream of obstacles that each in turn present themselves, whether foretold or undreamt, prevails this mental mechanic implementing the tools forging the assembly of inspiration. All must be overcome to complete the quest of achieving the ultimate reward: the intrinsic élan of invoking high creativity.
With the departure of a lingering, smoldering stare into your hearth’s fiery embers, you rouse your awakened consciousness into sudden action. Sound the horns! The time has come to begin the journey.
On these glorious flights of free ranging thought, your willing mount is named Curiosity and he is ready as always to carry you to the Portal of Reflection - the first way-point for all your adventures knight-errant. There your mind clears of the uncountable buzzing flies of daily striving: of half-finished tasks; of societal place and obligation; of perceived slights and regret. The Portal of Reflection is as a rippling pool of prismatic color. Here your mind calms and the outer world dims. The ripples both wash away the chaos and carry inward the tranquility of a quiet focus. A focus on just one of the great curiosities of your imagination, and on the several questions that accompany it.
Now with purpose firmly grasped, departing Reflection your next stage will take you to the mythical Conflux, there to wade amongst the swirling eddy of ideas and whitewater rushing concepts that hold for you great promise for untold discovery. But each who has ventured to the Conflux relates a different experience with most retelling that the place is indeed just myth: there is nothing there to be found at all except a cacophony of battling concepts, spiraling digressions and disturbing illusions. These fallen adventurers could not glean the secrets hidden there waiting; but only for the well-armed and worthy. These dilettantes turn away from the Conflux and return to their familiar daily tasks unfulfilled other than with a replenished reservoir of doubt
You, though, at the Conflux, begin to discern the intricacy of the colliding currents, the splash of sparkling color, the flash of enlightenment. It is not accident, or coincidence. Yes; of course. Now there is direction.
Now it remains to render a plan: a means to move forward into discovery. You are not without resources. Foremost and first, we require our best defense against our greatest foe, Doubt. Here it sets on the promontory: your castle Indomitable, unassailable to outside forces, built with the granite of unrelenting drive. This barrier from the external forces of doubt bolsters your will beyond the bounds of those less prepared. Your challenges will rise solely from within as Indomitable will repel all the external forces arrayed against you. You will be unshaken by the catapult-hurled stones of critics, naysayers and other detractors: they are through Indomitable, expunged from consideration. You are free from the falsity of opinion and acceptance.
In this quest to vanquish the unknown and to overcome the fear associated with that pursuit, there are armaments to aid you. Your piercing sword is called Insightful, your hardened shield Persistence, your bright star-encrusted helm Receptive. In your fight you must not conform your thoughts or be content with doctrine or protocol or to even accept them as companions. They are the boundaries working against you in your pursuit of creativity. Free yourself from them; they are imagined limits.
Once set upon the trek, barriers will abound tangible and not; real and fantastic. As of now, Warrior, slaying demons that manifest all manner of psychic obstruction in pursuit of ultimately achieving the as- yet un-imagined - high creativity, is your mission. Mark them: each demon is distinct and presents its vexing signature challenge. These are the Children of Doubt. Meet Cynicism, Uncertainty, Fear and Confusion. Careful, they have cousins as well. Some encountered are dispatched directly with head-on resolve. A few serendipitously vanquished with aplomb are thus dispelled forever, hindering progress no longer. The remaining may be feinted or else-wise evaded for a time but inevitably re-emerge to stymy your insights and thwart your breakthroughs until they, too, are ultimately disenchanted. Your higher senses tell you that you will encounter each in its time along your journey of discovery. You stroke Curiosity, readying him and reflecting on your mission: the object of your greatest fascination.
Still in the fiefdom doubt appears in the form of a familiar face, brushing you gently. All those you know will doubt, openly or secretly. Not conspiratorially, but as your well-meaning friend: for your own well being. How could they not? “Be sensible. Be practical. Come now, off your high horse. Why wouldn’t a famous knight have achieved this before?” Doubt will be your unwelcome and unrelenting companion throughout your journey.
Very well then. Fiefdom, castle, mount, map to the Conflux, beware of demons. All fairly straight- forward. Now what?
Creativity is largely developing previously unknown conceptual connections. Seeing or conceiving relationships where none existed before (invention) or were unknown (discovery). A lesser but important form is innovation, where the first wave creator achieved a breakthrough in the ranks of the forces of darkness, illuminating the breach for the innovator with improved weaponry to exploit, routing shadow everywhere and thereafter the entire world basks in the bright light of victory.
Now fortify thy will through a concoction evoked from the ingredients of imagination. Mix together knowledge, thought, possibility, inspiration, time, force, action, velocity, atmosphere and courage in this potion of originality. Cover from doubt and simmer. There’s no scripted recipe – that would doom the undertaking to repeating the mistakes of history. This is your unique solution. Add to taste. Perhaps an additional line of thought, more tangents as well – they are in season here. A pinch of outrageous, notes of the sublime. Hold the confusion. Bring to a boil….
Oh, that’s good. Nothing quite like it. You’ve never imbibed quite that fusion, it really releases all the flavors of conception. You need this elixir to match the power of the beast lurking within set about to defeat you. Here now summon the courage to pass through the Impenetrable Veil foretold before so perchance ultimately realizing the treasure sought. Have a draught and tread intrepidly into the Cavern of Mystery. There, your potion is beginning to work and that’s important because what you are about to attempt is the great magic called creation.
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Shall we now consider the trek for high creativity? Mustering all the adventuring faculties required for the journey from about the fiefdom and leaving behind all burdensome troubles, we mount Curiosity and with a shout we are off at a gallop toward Inspiration Point. There are many places Curiosity has taken us in our exploration of the Kingdom of Ideas and each region offers its bounty of unique attractions and possibilities for a knight-errant. Lately more and more we return to one province that holds particular fascination. The Creative must be curious as a natural state of being. How did this thing come to pass? Why has that thing not come to pass? Why does this thing behave in this way? Curiosity may range to all variety of possibilities, but one thing will emerge as the most fascinating. It has captured your imagination. Ah! We have arrived at Inspiration Point. Dismount and arm yourself for adventure.
Take in the lay of the land. Concepts here, forces of nature there, puzzling spectral forms of thought pulsing with choruses of harmonic sound reverberating from that bluff, iridescent colors about the waterfall and nearby tracks of a predator not familiar in this land, leading into that fabled Cavern of Mystery.
Imagination is what follows from Inspiration Point. The exploration of this chosen curiosity of greatest fascination. Perhaps it chose you? Scouting about using all your senses and perceptions: instinct and intuition, the inner voice, the acuity you have brought to bear; each in its part shape the burgeoning questions with which you began of why or how or why not now synthesizing into sharpening focus.
They play through your mind and mold into specific form that then in turn become the instruments to lay open possibilities for solution or better, inception. While this may occur nearly instantly as in a revelation, often it requires a gestation period from construct to victorious creation. Create a new musical piece in an inspired moment, but elsewise years may be required to formulate the readdress of particle physics. Not to diminish one in its suddenness, or the other in its fastidiousness.
Passing metaphysically beneath the ebony entrance thought and attention is drawn to the inscribed passage overhead in what seems liquid gold, “Madness Awaits All Ye Who Venture Inward”. Beyond there is darkness.
This requires a moment. Taken for a breath, you then undaunted continue forward in your thinking. Beyond the Blackness of the Veil that itself alone discourages and rebukes subconsciously most from any further endeavor of unique thought, now to you appear dimly lighted twisting passages that form a maze to confound those rooted in doctrine and discipline and closed to paradox and possibility. Here, scattered about are the invisible yet grizzly remains of those betrayed by linear thinking, logical deduction and supposition, trapped and incapable of further exploration. Others, just when gleaning the first sensation of unexplored possibility fled the area quickly, you deduce from the lack of tracks past this point of inference, doubtless fearing the onset of the madness foretold.
But you have passed beyond that point. You reflect in a calm, receptive state. There is no fear. Your mind adjusts, sifting the chaos. A higher state of conscious thought begins to summon the fragments of possibility and then marshals into fresh order the inputs arriving from unexpected vectors of thought. They form first simple separate harmonies that harken budding instrumentation and then somehow as if with independent will coalesce into full orchestration. A different partition of the mind senses slowly emanating patterns of light that soon burgeon into radiance as a wellspring sprouting about from no conscious source. With acute clarity you discern the correct course as if it was illuminated for you. The rest of the path through the Maze of Confusion is a simple matter of embracing rather than rejecting the unknown and so the final turns are completed, QED.
You pause to partake in a deserved refreshing drought of your concoction, sensing the now more pronounced aroma of fresh knowledge it contains, yet releases. Fortified with confidence and freshly freed from fear, flush with the wonder and excitement of this now expanded realm of possibility you eagerly press forward to further explore the gains thus far garnered.
Beyond the maze you fix your gaze upon a glen with gurgling streams of consciousness and wild game of roaming ideas. Your course is not a trodden path, but the grass unbent beneath aided by a cool breeze of instinct imperceptibly coaxes to an ancient forest looming.
Great trees of stout girth and impressive stature abound, towering above and demanding reverence, their many tangled branches nearly blocking the light from above. Each is a resolute principle: this one governing reason; that one establishing law; next to it, logical progression. Collectively they conspire collaboratively to spare man from the chaos of dreams and dangerous ideas, supplanting those ungoverned thoughts with enforced order and the imposed muffled harmony of jaded acceptance. From seedlings at civilization’s dawn they grew as certain as time, dominating accepted thought and establishing the boundaries of appropriate conception and expression.
The Lord of the Forest is the supremely powerful demon prince Reality. Aware of your incursion into the midst of his foreboding domain, he rises from his gnarled cold throne and assesses you with contempt. In a deep bellow resonating with authority he cries,
“Harken unto me, misguided miscreant! Who art thou but a mischievous interloper that brazenly dare intrude upon the sanctity of my realm of Established Reason? You are not Plato, Copernicus, Da Vinci or other great knight. You are but a foolish mortal who imagines himself a giant.” He bounds forward, evoking a chattering clamor from the small denizens in the trees, awoken from their tranquil slumber. Striding past the moss encrusted Trunk of Certainty and the ever-blossoming Tree of Doubt, he glances upward and says,
“Seek not the fruit from the high branches beyond sight. The dangers are too great, and you will surely fall from the Heights of Understanding. Be content with that which you see here about you. All the work of the world has already been done for you. Is the bounty I provide insufficient? Why is the firmament of structure and discipline I have long sown in my forest that relieves man of troubling questions yet found wanting by you?
Who are you to disrupt the silence of acceptance? Your kind I’ve encountered before: knights errant with a fevered bent of heroic notions and striving for creativity beyond the safe and secure boundaries I have erected for mankind’s tranquil confinement. Your unprincipled and dangerous thinking would disrupt the order I provide. You would challenge Reality? Bah! As with a rabid dog you must be put down lest your condition infect. Come then with your challenge and test your mettle against Reality. Claim your prize of imagination if you can!” He brandishes a flaming cat o’ nine tails called Order in his right and in his left holds secure the shield Impossibility. His helm is Darkness.
With a sudden flash of lightening and then a crackle of thunder the duel begins. Reality distracts with a staccato torrent of recitations of established physical laws and mathematical equations, seeking your submission here now confronted by the revered scholarship of your ancestors, hoping to break your focus and obscure the insight for which you reach. Circling and feinting menacingly Reality seeks the weakness in your approach. Where is that chink of doubt beyond your brave demeanor? All men fear, all who travel to this forest doubt. What is your fear, your vulnerability? Reality summons his tools of deduction, observation, limits, probability and expected outcome.
Here the moment of consequence now at hand and razor-focused you penetrate beyond Reality’s false façade that darkness can no longer conceal. Studied closely, the demon’s image is not so immutable as legend has it, as you dared suspect. The outline of his form waivers as if with heat as a few sunbeams penetrate the forest and cast fragments of illumination on Reality. Nearly imperceptible at first but becoming clearer by the moment as if now probed with magnified scrutiny: the shield Impossibility has cracks that its gilded veneer cannot conceal. Reality lashes out repeatedly with Order, parried each time by Persistence, while you hold Insightful in studied abeyance, awaiting a penetrating moment to breakthrough.
Now it arrives. You strike with clear precision, shattering Impossibility. Reality’s defenses exposed and transparent you flash the climactic stroke of insight and with a wail of defeat Reality disintegrates into a thousand particles of vanquished dogma. The forest gloom lifts as branches recede and the sunburst illuminates the kaleidoscope of color on the Flowers of Possibility in sudden bloom on the forest carpet and shines on the glistening Fruit of Creativity ripening rapidly on the branches above.
Though time here is unmeasurable, you perceive the approach of twilight as you sense a clearing not far from this forest of musty, stifling confinement. Time is a temporal construct of the mind. Time is a place and the time is here. You enter the clearing as twilight gives way to dusk. Here no branches of logic obstruct the view of the vast clear infinity above.
Popping out of the dimming indigo sky appear a few shy sprites of illumination. Their numbers rapidly increase until the darkening heavens soon transform again, now bursting with a million radiant stars, each a single thought, some independent and some gathered as constellations. Fiery comets in a spectrum of colors shoot roaring with varying musical tonality in all directions, all of them carriers of a train of related concepts. Fewer than the comets are large translucent planetoids, hovering at varying altitude and glowing with the multiple colors of the streaking comets, as if formed from their collision. Lower in the atmosphere are flashes of lightening and then tantalizingly near but ethereal buzz softly hundreds of fireflies glowing ideas on and off. The lightning flashes of comprehension last but a moment, the brief glowing of distinct perceptions gone almost before being noticed yet your mind captures them in its jar. In awe of the stunning spectacle you realize this is the primal realm of high creativity and you are part of it.
The object of your greatest fascination, that which you ignited at Inspiration Point is here uncovered in all its essence and secret workings together with all the independent forces acting on it arrayed and identified, as well as those it acts upon. It’s more beautiful than you had imagined, and the possibilities for freeing it to its limitless potential are here before you, crystallizing in your mind. Instantly new thoughts flow like a current. Ideas emerge and are sifted. New connections are made, new ways of seeing something very specific, as if with a new lens. Patterns which were beyond perception are revealed. They have been ripped from the ether and harnessed to your will, like a wild cerebral mustang broken.
You have reached an epiphany: the most emotive, fulfilling yet utterly fleeting experience in human existence. The epiphany is overwhelming and the true meaning of awe-inspiring. In that instant your mind seems to capture and tame a psychological whirlwind; transforming phantasms into precision-engineered constructs in a burst of brilliant cognition captured in a moment out of time. Every neuron fires in a symphony of perfectly focused and targeted projection. With sudden, piercing clarity something weightless but of great bearing penetrates deep into the cortex, sparking a blossoming euphoria propelled by rushing adrenaline. All weariness vanishes. An unknown new joy embraces you and a rare happiness sets upon you: a spirit independent of any held beliefs and a harbinger of new ones. How could you not have seen this before? How could it be no one ever had? Suddenly it is all so clear. This epiphany is the pinnacle of being: the greatest moment of your life.
You were indeed meant to be here in this particular realm of thought in this time. The thing is now formed in your mind. Unshackled from the grip of impossibility to the edge of existence it hovers. But the final part of earthly toil still remains: coaxing this manifestation from your mind to a form. Whether music or philosophy or invention or discovery, you need to complete the journey of creation: to see it become, lest it waivers and dissipates into a near forgotten dream.
This final passage of the journey whisks you back from the heights of awareness and imagination, joltingly, into normal conscious thought and you find yourself at your fiefdom on familiar ground. Into the tower and up to the top: the time has come for the transmutation. All the treasure trove of newly memorized thoughts hard won are transformed to tangible notes and thereby transmuted from original conception to permanent form on parchment. Your pen becomes the sharpening wheel for your sword Insightful. When some thoughts seek escape during the transition, Persistence fixes their position. The helm Receptive glistens with unprecedented brilliance. But the spell is transitory – you must act with alacrity. You write: constructing, unveiling, illustrating and then demonstrating, all through the night and unto dawn in one uninterrupted and utterly fulfilling session. Nothing has ever been so satisfying.
Wrought from naught, behold now the brilliance of creation, set free upon earth to reshape understanding and reality. Coaxed spell-like from its secret lair comes suddenly, blazing now, unveiled in sublime splendor as the supreme manifestation of magnificent and profound genius, your discovery.
It is done. You have done it: the rarefied achievement of high creativity. Staring reflectively into the Fireplace of Memory you savor the recounting of the amazing adventure as you restore Insightful to its rightful place above the brightly glowing embers of your mantle.
Below in the stable you hear the whinnies, snorts and stomping hooves of Curiosity. He looks up, catching you with a glint, eager for the next adventure to Inspiration Point. You return the glint.
Richard Tempest
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. - Da Vinci
Science Never Settles
From the earliest moments of civilization, man has looked to the night sky in search for answers to universal questions of every sort. The earliest lasting monuments and great structures on every continent share at least one important commonality: they all had a purpose of studying the stars. Curious that these disparate people with no means of communicating with one another each had the same first societal curiosity, and more so that this curiosity concerned the movements of the heavens, over what would seem more pressing daily needs at the dawn of civilization.
So it was that the first science, wrought from wonder, mystery, curiosity and little else: Astronomy, was born. That is, if what we believe we know today of the very beginnings of civilization is true. But even here, there are important questions not yet settled. The Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt is of an unknown date of origin. Until recently, the best scientific evidence put its construction at around 2500 BC, and the earliest civilizations dating back no further than 3500 BC. But recently new techniques and further accumulated geological evidence suggest the Sphinx may well have been constructed much earlier, perhaps around 7000 BC: 3500 years before any other record of civilization.
That is, if the Sphinx is that old, civilization may have existed for about twice as long as we have believed up until now. Obviously if true, this little bit of discovery shatters everything we have been told about our earliest history and raises a thousand new questions. One such question might be related to the Sphinx, itself. Why would the earliest known monument, adding to the mystery that it remains unclear how such primitive people could have constructed it in the first place, have chosen to make a giant mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion? The ancient Egyptians revered it as dedication to a solar deity.
In the surrounding area are the three Great Pyramids, meticulously positioned and sized proportionately exactly as the three stars of Orion’s Belt, as they appeared in the Egyptian sky at around 10,000 BC. For now, let us just say this new Riddle of the Sphinx casts a fresh light onto the still unknown mysteries of our ancient world, one illuminated by science which itself is always evolving, seeking new answers to old riddles.
Shall we quickly delve into especially fantastical possibilities born of the latest science, the offspring of that first science of astronomy? Let us peek then into what is rapidly becoming accepted scientific theory on the nature of the cosmos. It was only about five hundred years ago when mankind’s belief was that the Earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it. What Copernicus did to smack the hubris out of Man was only a small setback compared to what we are now informed as Earth is an insignificant speck in the universe of one hundred billion galaxies each with one hundred billion stars that is fourteen billion years old. If that is not enough, according to multiverse theory, there may be a billion more universes in alternate realities. Next, according to string theory, there are not only the three dimensions we perceive, or a fourth if you accept time as a dimension, but there may be ten or more dimensions.
Black holes, cosmic strings and wormholes are postulated as other fantastic anomalies in the vast unknown. Matter as we know it is, we are told, only about one quarter of what comprises the universe, as “dark matter” (as yet undefined) is the prominent component. That at the moment before the unfathomable Big Bang, all the matter of those hundred billion galaxies was compressed into an area smaller than the point of a pin. The point being, even the oldest science is anything but settled.
Speaking of old, what child has not been fascinated by the story of the dinosaurs? The great beasts captured our imagination. Their imagery and fearsome majesty somehow have clawed their way into our collective psyche and remain a source of much mystery and curiosity. We must be sympathetic to the paleontologist’s struggle to paint and populate the world of dinosaurs of 65 million years ago, given the problems encountered even accurately dating the Sphinx of a few thousand years. To tell the story of this prehistoric world, these brave scientists have been charged with constructing a jigsaw puzzle of thousands of pieces, with but a few fractured pieces on the table. All the other pieces not at hand would need to be constructed, but from what? Who could expect even a small part of it to be perfect?
Starting with a few fossils and some forensic dating techniques, layers of assumptions built upon one another, each gaining acceptance gradually and enhanced with the discovery of new treasures of fossils and petrified bones: the material ghosts of the long past. From these meager tools, the entire world of the Mesozoic Age was constructed, almost entirely in the minds of the eager willing.
In recent times with improved analysis from advances in science, and the discovery of more dinosaur remains in areas until then believed unsuited to their survival, much of our present understanding has caused the replacement of many pieces of the puzzle. Current science reveals the paleontologists’ constructed vision of the brontosaurus would be a physical impossibility, and that nothing in our understanding of reptilian biology allows for multi-ton reptiles to rampage at speed through the savanna. From that, there is a view that the dread T-Rex was actually a flightless bird, not a reptile after all. Add to that how and when they came to be and how they suddenly vanished perhaps in a great cataclysm that spared other reptiles, birds and mammals while cruelly vanquishing dinosaurs is another mystery.
Sir Isaac Newton is the father of physics, renowned as one of mankind’s greatest minds and for many contributions but most famously postulating the laws of the force of gravity and of motion and producing the mathematical proofs.
Conspicuously, Newton did not propose or even hypothesize on how there is gravity: what it is that gives gravity its power. In his words, he had “not assigned the cause of this power.” Even today, scientists don’t know how gravity works, postulating the existence of the graviton particle.
Those of Einstein likely not settled for long either. Speed of light squared? Seems poetic even if melodramatic and likely misunderstood to be construed literally, despite the reverence in which it is held. Much of Newton’s revered discoveries have been supplanted by Einstein’s theories. Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity in turn is being overthrown by the newer branch of the very much unsettled science of quantum mechanics, whose theories and recent experiments rival on the sub-atomic level those of the cosmologists in speculating on the vast unknowns of the universe.
Discovery of the utterly fantastic and beautiful DNA molecule as the key to all plant and animal life and beholding its awesome magnificence in self-replicating perpetual perfection through the eons we see (albeit only indirectly) the truth of a powerful majesty dwarfing our understanding of the grandest things unveiled in the smallest dimensions. With a single DNA molecule estimated to consist of 200 billion perfectly arranged atoms, and DNA exists even in amoebas, it would seem a stretch to believe this happened accidentally by lightning striking ponds with primordial goo all across the planet and formed living cells from basic building blocks like amino acids. An oft used analogy credited to Sir Fred Doyle, an astronomer, is that the likelihood of life forming that way is akin to believing a tornado strikes a junkyard and a fully formed 747 airliner is the end product. But the former is still the held principal theory on the origin of life. I suggest this is not settled science.
Subsequently the undertaking and rapid completion of the daunting task of decoding the human genome in the late 20th century has changed a lot of established assumptions, the axioms upon which beliefs about biology were held became obsolete when now focused on the molecular level, and the repercussions in turn alter the macro perspective – our understanding of life itself. While genetics has opened a whole new window into the examination of life and created a new science unto itself, at present it holds the doubtful premise that 96% of the DNA molecule is “junk code”. Science is not generally inclined to admit it does not know: doing so makes it problematic to put a theory to bed as settled science. We can be confident there is much still to be discovered about the genetic code and its influence on the miracle of life.
Science is exploration and discovery of matters related to the physical and natural world. Curiosity is the driving force behind science, although paradoxically, curiosity itself can be held to exist outside the domain of science, given the definition of science. In other words, while science depends on curiosity, science cannot explain why curiosity exists.
To understand the mind may be the next great adventure for mankind. What is a thought? How are there memories? What is consciousness? Certainly, what would seem a most important role of science that is core to understanding the nature of humanity is one of which there is not even enough basic understanding to even suggest anything is settled, or even a relatable theory on the miracles of the mind.
I hope to have demonstrated in a brief essay that most of science is anything but settled. Of all things that may be evolving, science might be the signature example.
