The Importance of Being Interested

for a democracy to be a democracy, it is vital to have access to information and the ability to understand what it means.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

Iwould love to be certain, to be sure of something, but my anxiety makes that unlikely

Cancel your travel plans; you can simply stare at all the atoms that you have at home; they may well form something magnificent one day, so enjoy them while they take the shape of your desk-tidy or pan-scourer.

Questions can be seen as impertinent and dangerous. You may lose everything you hold dear – your god, your afterlife, your free will, your feeling of superiority, your mind… even your entire reality. Knowledge can be framed as loss rather than gain. It is a quandary I have been dealing with for the last fifteen years

Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
GEORGE CARLIN

One of Richard’s favourite poems is ‘The More Loving One’ by W. H. Auden, from which he takes that the universe is without purpose or agency, but that it is where we discovered love.

He tells me about the Caledonian Antisyzygies (which is now your new best Scrabble word, as long as someone already has ‘ant’ on the board. A long shot, I know). This is the presence of two polarities within an individual. Richard feels as if he is both an atheist and a theist, in a state of disjunction living on a boundary.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

A scientist’s pessimistic realism is often the most coherent and quotable way of accessing their work, but after the humdrum, after the ‘cold and indifferent’, comes a big BUT…