Two appealingly contradictory/complementary quotes collided on my desk this week:
this from Peter Forbes reviewing a book on beauty and science:
‘There is a deep strand of thought that claims that science destroys beauty by analysing – it atomises, dissects, reduces; it ‘unweaves the rainbow’ by splitting it into mere wavelengths of light’
and this from Tim Robinson’s evocative book on Connemara:
‘That the world is explicable is miraculous, and so explanations need not be the undoing of miracles’
23 February 2012
Comments
from ash: there’s a procedure where scientists can slow down bursts of light and stop them – they can capture different frequencies of the light spectrum – used in developing superfast computing it’s called a ‘trapped rainbow’ – we’re probably communicating across trapped rainbows right now – miracle or explanation?
28 February 2012