Nearing the end of my reading of Valerie’s coffee table book “The LIFE Millenium: The 100 Most Important Events & People of the Past 1,000 Years”, I read this about Isaac Newton:
A passionately religious man in a time of great scientific discovery, Isaac Newton wanted to know how God’s universe worked. His quest for answers gave us the law of universal gravitation, calculus, a new theory of color and light, and the three laws of motion that form the basis of modern mechanics. Brilliant and creative, the English physicist and mathematician synthesized the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and others, formalizing and transforming physical science.
Yet, looking back, Newton said, “I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
I suppose that this is another way to say, “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know”. Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant minds the world has ever known (he like *invented* calculus), understood that his unparalleled advances in science were as nothing in comparison to “the great ocean of truth” which lay undiscovered in his immediate proximity.
The situation is no different for ourselves I believe. The sum of all of our accumulated knowledge is as the candle flame to the sun, it casts a small degree of light which dispels the darkness but itself is overwhelmed by the light which illumines entire worlds.
What’s cooler is to interpret
Must continue my Jedi training.