QQC 7

"During this entire period Leibniz read, wrote, and thought continually, pursuing ideas with a strength and intensity know to ordinary people only in their pursuit of wealth and power. His motto at the time was, "With every lost hour a part of life perishes.""

Leibniz is also a funny guy. The common folk can specialize in maybe one or two facets of intellectual pursuit, while Leibniz apparently specializes in nearly all of the intellectual avenues of his time. Perhaps his head was a lot bigger then everyone else. You would think he would need the extra space to store his large stores of multi-faceted knowledge.

My question involves Leibniz's motto. What did he mean by it? Did he mean to suggest that life is short and precious and that we must seize all opportunities to utilize it? Or did he mean that knowledge is lost to us by the second and we must waste no time to record it? Food for thought.

And now I present to you a small haiku dealing with Leibniz

I know lots of stuff
I seek knowledge in this life
My head is quite big

Or was that the haiku I wrote about Dave...

QQC 6

"A few months later Halley found an opportunity to visit Newton in Cambridge, and put the question to him: "What would be the curve described by planets on the supposition that gravity diminishes as the square of the distance?" Newton answered immediately, "An ellipse." Struck with joy and amazement, Halley asked him how he knew that. "Why," said Newton, "I have calculated it."

Newton's a funny guy. He can calculate things that no other person on Earth could have done, things that describe the very nature of the universe, and acts all nonchalant when people ask him about it. Furthermore, it's amazing to see how he cares so little about it, he doesn't bother telling anybody or publishing it. What scientist on the planet today would ever do such a thing? None that I know of to be sure.

Here's a haiku that I think expresses Newton

Just spending all day
Inventing some calculus
Not a big deal

Or at least something like that.

QQC 5

"To what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? The notion was contrary to the belief in the Great Chain of Being, which held that the world was carefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always had and always would."

When people are so rooted within their beliefs, it becomes hard for them to change and adjust to new findings. It's interesting to see how science and religion have collided throughout history; both attempting to change the way people look at the world.

I've always wondered, will there will ever be the ultimate explanation of the heavens and the universe? What would such an explanation look like? Will it show that the war between religion and science was ultimately futile? That both facets of human understanding were two roads to the same destination?

Such thinking is only a fantasy, as our understanding of the world is limited. I highly doubt I will ever see such an explanation in my lifetime.

QQC A Short History of Nearly Everything 2

"With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation
so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside
the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in
1951) is 'less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground' in
the words of Carl Sagan."

Again, this is one of those "wow" quotes. What is the energy of a snowflake hitting the ground? Probably some microscpopic amount, and yet we are able to fill in the blanks of the cosmic map with that energy. It's astounding how finely sensitive these instruments are. To the untrained eye, the big, hulking sattelite dishes look anything but sensitive. But of all the detection instruments on earth, they must be some of the finest.

It's also interesting to think about how much energy we know is out there in space, and know how little of it actually comes to our lonely little corner of the universe. The facts really put our loneliness into a rather depressing perspective.

QQC A Short History of Nearly Everything

"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive (but all of which had once been you.)

Uh, wow. I never really thought about it like that before. The question that necessitates an answer would then be, how are we even alive in the first place?

I can't believe that just my magically placing these atoms together, you would come out with a human. Come to think of it, there's "organic" matter everywhere the universe, massive clouds of it. It's interesting how regardless of how much of the stuff of life is present, it takes some miracle to spontaneously create life.

So yes, the question really is, how are we even alive? Is it the networking of the molecules? Is it something else that we have no understanding of as of yet? Possibly. It would certainly be neat to find out.