Unweaving the Rainbow
Did Newton "unweave the rainbow" by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says Dawkins - Newton's unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved; the solution is often more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mystery. Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, and combines them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder.
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What Hacker News says
- Read more science books and then you can fully explain it!
One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.
No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!
You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.
- Mind is a myth - UG Krishnamurti
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
Unweaving the rainbow - Richard Dawkins
- Goethe was the king of that sort of irrationality.
You might find the essays in Richard Dawkins's book, Unweaving the Rainbow interesting since the thread drawing them together is that understanding something scientifically does not make it less fascinating, if anything it makes everything even more interesting.
- If you do a search through HN, you'll find some really good recommendations.
Read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled By Randomness is also good) if you want to peer into the mind of an investor.
Read Hesse's Siddhartha if you're thinking along the lines of culture/religion/philosophy.
Read a few Ayn Rand books if you like libertarianism and don't really care to relate to the characters.
Read We by Yevgheny Zamyatin if you want an interesting allegory that metaphorically compares heaven to a dystopian dictatorship.
Read Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins if you're very interested in the sciences.
I remember Sebastian Marshall recommending Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa -- I'd recommend it too. It's pretty good, and I was especially interested since I've been doing marshal arts for over 10 years now.
And read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! no matter how you think. It's fantastic.
EDIT: More Books!
I read these when I was in elementary school, but they still hold their value:
The Giver by Lois Lowry if you want more dystopias.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery if you're feeling especially playful.
- I ignore my impending death and remember that I regard any day I didn't learn something new/do something interesting as a wasted day.
Sometimes you just have to live in the now and let the future (and past) take care of themselves.
EDIT: I should probably expand on this just a little so it doesn't sound quite so dismissive (not the intent), I got diagnosed with two potentially serious medical conditions about 13 years ago (at 33 and within a few months of each other) and for the first time I had to truly contemplate that some day I'd die (we all know we will but how many of us actually consider it seriously rather than pushing it to the back of the mind especially in our early 30's), I realised I was lucky to have existed at all and that the only meaning in life is the one I ascribe it so other than the things everyone has to do to live I just spend time with my loved ones, indulge my curiosity, read what I want, watch what I want, play video games if that's what I want to do and admire the universe, as for the health stuff, one is stable and the other while not great isn't going to kill me any sooner (+/- few % statistically)
> We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
> We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? (Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow).
- Read that one first in one of Dawkins' books, maybe Unweaving the Rainbow.
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