As I’ve discussed before on this blog, my little digital homestead within the greater “social network” of cyberspace, I really like science. As a kid, my parents gave me chemistry sets and How-And-Why Wonder books and electrical training boards that you could make into a low-power radio transmitter (and I did, but only under my father’s close supervision; pirate radio stations would not be condoned in his house!). I had a telescope to watch the heavens, and I was glued to the TV whenever a manned rocket was launched (back in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days; the Space Shuttle got boring quite quickly). I went to Newark College of Engineering after high school and learned a lot of math, chemistry, physics and material sciences before turning to management courses.
And so, even though my career direction eventually veered away from science (which I sometimes regret), I never lost my interest in it. I still read Scientific American from cover to cover each month, I have a poster explaining the Standard Particle Model on the wall of my office (which no one else there understands), and I watch Teaching Company videos on things like dark matter and dark energy (which I’ve been going through lately, after finishing other courses on Chaos Theory and Einstein’s Relativity). I definitely think that science is one of the best things that the human race has come up with.
And yet . . . I know that science is not the whole story. There’s a lot more to our lives and to our existence than science can define and understand. But science is a seductive mistress, and » continue reading …
The deliverance is called Nirvana, and is not explained or described other than that the cycle of birth, death and karma are ended permanently once Nirvana is reached.