"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one
small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes
away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is
"mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But
do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my
imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch
one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part --
perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is
belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing
all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all
together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does
not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more
marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do
the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can
speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning
sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower
stall. Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed
barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character
from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of
while he showers....
