Albert Einstein 240 words, 323K views, 90 comments
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On Jun 27, 2017Chip Boyd wrote :
I really enjoyed reading the comments here. There is intelligence, passion and imagination in all of them. I wish our political discourse could have some of the nuance, respectfulness and insight found here. We do not need to see important, fundamental things the same way to be enlivened and nourished by the thoughts of others. As to the question of order in the universe: In a book called "Leadership and the New Science," author Margaret Wheatley includes a photo of a "three-winged bird." It is a beautiful image of a graphed system of a million points. At a mere one-hundred thousand points, we would see nothing but an apparently random set of dots- and even at five-hundred thousand points would not see a clear pattern. Only when enough points have been graphed do we see an amazing and beautiful pattern. This may apply to directly to our understanding of the universe. We are still at the beginning in some ways, seeing only randomness in many situations when deeper patterns and potential unity may exist beyond our limited comprehension. In any case, the world we know is full of beauty and terror, of pattern and accidents. We know enough to see we are not rivals in existence and should strive for the highest levels of love, cooperation and compassion of which we are capable. And in the final analysis, we need a political definition of these things, a social contract that brings out the best in human beings.
On Jun 27, 2017 Chip Boyd wrote :
I really enjoyed reading the comments here. There is intelligence, passion and imagination in all of them. I wish our political discourse could have some of the nuance, respectfulness and insight found here. We do not need to see important, fundamental things the same way to be enlivened and nourished by the thoughts of others. As to the question of order in the universe: In a book called "Leadership and the New Science," author Margaret Wheatley includes a photo of a "three-winged bird." It is a beautiful image of a graphed system of a million points. At a mere one-hundred thousand points, we would see nothing but an apparently random set of dots- and even at five-hundred thousand points would not see a clear pattern. Only when enough points have been graphed do we see an amazing and beautiful pattern. This may apply to directly to our understanding of the universe. We are still at the beginning in some ways, seeing only randomness in many situations when deeper patterns and potential unity may exist beyond our limited comprehension. In any case, the world we know is full of beauty and terror, of pattern and accidents. We know enough to see we are not rivals in existence and should strive for the highest levels of love, cooperation and compassion of which we are capable. And in the final analysis, we need a political definition of these things, a social contract that brings out the best in human beings.