Posts Tagged ‘Perspective’
A little bite of food for thought
Nature does its thing
I stumbled upon this quote today and liked it so much that it deserves a little blog post and not ‘just a tweet’
“Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.”
- Oscar Wilde
I love how insightful this quote is, but perhaps because it is so open to interpretation.
While things evolve, they are not lost, they just become undecipherable: what has been is a sequence of required states/stages to become what is today and what will become. But: 1 – while the path we take to reach something is needed to get there, being somewhere doesn’t tell us how we got there, and 2 – it also doesn’t say that the path is unique.
What do you think?
PS: I love quotes that at first make you smile, then think, then remain slightly unsatisfied with more questions than answers.
Happy Anniversary, Pale Blue Dot
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…
And to quote the words of Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture
And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.
A healthy dose of perspective
I came across this wonderful tirade from Ann Druyan, wife of late Carl Sagan.
Conversation avec André Brahic – I
J’ai eu la chance d’avoir une longue conversation avec André Brahic qui m’a accordé un peu de son temps à l’assemblée générale de l’Union Astronomique Internationale en août 2009.
André Brahic, en plus d’être un explorateur de l’univers, est un philosophe dont on ne se lasse pas, avec un sens de l’humour et une joie de vivre que je tenais à partager. Voici donc le premier épisode de notre conversation.
When astronomers speak from the heart
Sixty Symbols is a brilliant video podcast series explaining symbols used in science but for Valentine’s day, they made a special episode where a symbol we use hopefully every day – a heart – is put in a scientific context. At first we see heart-shaped astronomical objects, and then the video simply shows that science is made with the heart. And this is really what drives scientists: their heart :)
Check it out and say hello to Amanda (aka @astropixie)
