More excerpts from obscure sources

So, the quote underneath my blog title comes from a speech by a very famous scientist commemorating another very famous scientist's birthday. You can hazard a guess as to their identities after you read the transcript for yourself--a name is actually mentioned somewhere within the speech--but that's really not the point of my post. Most people think scientists are a bunch of uncouth, illiterate, math-nerds but that's not always the case, at least from my experience. I've come across lots of thought-provoking, expressive passages in both science treatises and textbooks.

For example:

"With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion.

...

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself, as we see, to the most general problems of our science, refusing to let himself be diverted to more grateful and more easily attained ends. I have often heard colleagues try to attribute this attitude of his to extraordinary will-power and discipline --wrongly, in my opinion. The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. There he sits, our beloved Planck, and smiles inside himself at my childish playing-about with the lantern of Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no threadbare explanation. May the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics in a single logical system."

On measuring vast stretches of time

"Let us make a 200-page book equal in length to the time from the start of the Cambrian to the present; that is, about 600 million years. Then each full page will represent roughly three million years, each line about ninety thousand years, and each letter or small space about fifteen hundred years. The origin of the Earth would be about seven books ago and the origin of the universe (which has been dated only approximately) ten or so books before that. Almost the whole of recorded human history would be covered by the last two or three letters of the book. If you now turn back the pages of the book, slowly reading one letter at a time--remember, each letter fifteen hundred years--then this may convey to you something of the immense stretches of time we shall have to consider. On this scale the span of your own life would be less than the width of a comma. "

I was proctoring an exam and came across the above passage while idly flipping through my copy of the test book. I don't know who wrote it, but I think it beautifully captures the scale of the human lifespan in comparison to longer periods of time. It also made me think about how I measure time and what the sum of my experiences amounts to on the 'cosmic balance'.

I have some difficulty measuring time, as evidenced by my habitual lateness and chronic procrastination. Time works best for people when we don't notice it. Usually when I am absorbed by my own thoughts or am on a task, hours can pass by without me noticing. I don't like being interrupted or having to stop when I am working on something that I think is interesting, hence my lateness. Conversely when I do not find something interesting, I am very much aware of time passing by and will avoid doing the task entirely, hence my procrastination. I also routinely mis-estimate how long a process should take. Or perhaps I actually estimate correctly but fail to meet my target times. Whatever. I'm getting better at being punctual but sometimes fall into my old habits.

And sometimes it's hard to keep my negative experiences in perspective. On a bad day, I've often wanted to just get life over with. But lately I've been thinking that this would not be such a smart move; since all people die eventually, why preempt the ending? In fact, considering that life is so short, it seems silly to be impatient. Life is finite, what comes after and before is forever. Or maybe not, I don't know--haven't tried it yet.

So , in short, I measure time disjointedly and human life weighs nil relative to the totality of existence.