Igor Schwarzmann wants to know everything about everything.
More: wired/vanity--the text heavy version, Cognitive Cities, Third Wave
tumbled vanity
December 11, 2011
Scientia means “knowledge:” science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts. Equally, poetry might or might not be driven by feeling but what it is “about” is relationships – between word and sound, word and thing, word and thought, sound and meaning, words and other words. So is science. Darwin wondered constantly about the relationships of organic forms – in earth, in stone, in what happens between red clover and bumble bees, orchid and moth. The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they’re right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. “A scientist should be the first to say he doesn’t know. A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there.