.
... [Einstein's General Theory of Relativity] describes a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea...
And all of this ... was not a tale told by an idiot in a fit of lunacy or a hallucination caused by Calabria's burning Mediterranean sun and its dazzling sea.
It was reality. Or better, a glimpse of reality, a little less veiled than our blurred and banal everyday view of it. A reality that seems to be made of the same stuff that our dreams are made of, but that is nevertheless more real than our clouded, quotidian dreaming.
—Carlo Rovelli
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
.
I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.
May I not reply with a parable?
The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.
—Albert Einstein, when asked if he would define himself as a pantheist
.
No comments:
Post a Comment