Verbatim » the spirit of inquiry

innovation

Shanta Rohse — Sat, 13 May 2006 03:19:38 +0000

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome.

attributed to Albert Einstein

critical thinking

Shanta Rohse — Sat, 13 May 2006 02:35:21 +0000

Very few really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justification, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

Spoken by the Vampire Marius in Ann Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, 1985.

adventures first, explanations later

Shanta Rohse — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:48:18 +0000

And the Gryphon added ‘Come, let’s hear some of your adventures.’

‘I could tell you my adventures – beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly: ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’

‘Explain all that,’ said the Mock Turtle.

‘No, no! The adventures first,’ said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: ‘explanations take such a dreadful time.’

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1992 (Folio Society; originally 1865), p. 91-2.

much madness is divinest sense

Shanta Rohse — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 02:44:30 +0000

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Emily Dickinson, Part One: Life, IX, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1924; from Bartleby.com

the quirks and agendas of exploration

Shanta Rohse — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:43:12 +0000

Many circumstances conspire to extinguish scientific discoveries, especially those that cause discomfort about our culture’s sacred norms. As a speciies, we cling to the familiar, comforting conformities of the mainstream. However, “convention” penetrates more deeply than we tend to admit. Even if we lack a proper name for and knowledge of the history of any specific philosophy or thought style, all of us are embedded in our own safe “reality.” Our outlooks shape what we see and how we know. Any idea we conceive as fact or truth is integrated into an entire style of thought, of which we are usually unaware. Call the cultural constraints “trained incapacities,” “thought collectives,” “social constructions of reality.” Call the dominating inhibitions that determine our point of view whatever you wish. They affect all of us, including scientitists. All are saddled with heavy linguistic, national, regional, and generational impediments to perception. Like those of everyone else, the scientists’s hidden assumptions affect his or her behavior, unwittingly restricting thought.

Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, 1998, pp. 2-3, whose theory of symbiogenesis challenges a central tental of neodarwinism.

the only thing that never fails

Shanta Rohse — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 20:11:16 +0000

[Learning] is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then, to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, then you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that, you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King, 1938, in which Merlyn advises the young King Arthur on coping with frustration and sadness