“Cosmos” is absolutely fantastic. Can’t recommend it enough.
I too can’t understand the idea that knowing how a thing works can make the thing any less awe-inspiring.
Case in point: supermassive black holes. I understand the basics of what they are, but I find the idea that the mass sometimes in the neighborhood of billions of suns could be compressed into sphere smaller than I could ever hope to see, even if it didn’t prevent all light from escaping its grasp, to be absolutely amazing. That the gas falling into these black holes can move so fast and so forcefully that the friction generates the most powerful bursts of energy known to exist in the universe, sending bursts of gamma rays lancing across the universe.
How can anybody find such things anything but amazing and worthy of wonder?
I feel that I have linked my self-esteem or something to how new something is to me. I.e., if I already understand something, I might tell myself that “I shouldn’t be excited about this.”
I think more generally, our emotions might seem like they should correspond to certain facts (like whether something is “magical” in the case of awe), when in fact our emotions do not.
“Cosmos” is absolutely fantastic. Can’t recommend it enough.
I too can’t understand the idea that knowing how a thing works can make the thing any less awe-inspiring.
Case in point: supermassive black holes. I understand the basics of what they are, but I find the idea that the mass sometimes in the neighborhood of billions of suns could be compressed into sphere smaller than I could ever hope to see, even if it didn’t prevent all light from escaping its grasp, to be absolutely amazing. That the gas falling into these black holes can move so fast and so forcefully that the friction generates the most powerful bursts of energy known to exist in the universe, sending bursts of gamma rays lancing across the universe.
How can anybody find such things anything but amazing and worthy of wonder?
I feel that I have linked my self-esteem or something to how new something is to me. I.e., if I already understand something, I might tell myself that “I shouldn’t be excited about this.”
I think more generally, our emotions might seem like they should correspond to certain facts (like whether something is “magical” in the case of awe), when in fact our emotions do not.