The Wonderful Dominance of the Weird
Anyone who has listened to me rant over the past decades will know that one of the most important ideas that I was gifted in my young life reading both science and “science fiction” in the early 1960’s comes from J.B.S. Haldane. The memory I have of his famous quote is this: “Not only is the universe weirder than we suppose. It is weirder than we can suppose.” If you take that really seriously (which is in practice not easy I think - it turns you into a poet, an artist, a scientist, a philosopher and makes you a little prickly to deal with) it instills a profound level of humility that underlies your entire sense of self. It reminds me of what Henry Corbin called “mystical poverty.” This notion then appeared at another pivot point in my life when I tried to read Nicholas of Cusa in college. In his thought it takes the form of the docta ignorantia which we’ll be thinking about this coming spring in the context of Johannes Hoff’s book on Nicholas. But this stuff shows up all the time if you’re sensitive to it. Particularly in contemporary science. This may seem strange to those who still think of science as a form of simple-minded engineering on a quasi-Newtonian model. (And remember that Newton didn’t see it that way - he was also an alchemist.) But science at the level of sophistication we’ve now achieved reveals really bizarre things everywhere. Here are three things I’ve run across recently which I want to recommend to you to get you in the mood.
Xenobots! Here is the ever-incredible Philip Ball explaining things for us: Cells Form Into Xenobots on Their Own. It’s hard to overstate the radical impact of this on biological thinking.
Again from Quanta magazine comes this marvel: Inside the Proton. ‘the Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine.
And from one of my favorite podcasts, always worth listening to, The Ezra Klein Show, Time Is Way Weirder Than You Think. If Corbin’s cyclical time seems odd, or Gaston Bachelard’s Intuition of the Instant makes your head explode, try this!