The topic I find most urgent and compelling is my sense of wonder. This sense feels salvational. I would like to understand it, amplify it, and convey it as widely as possible to as many people as possible.
There is a large gap between the modern scientific worldview and the way that we typically construct personal meaning. What does our life mean in a universe that is so big? We typically think about our life in terms of a first person narrative that is set in our local time and place, and yet we also know that there are billions of galaxies in the universe, and that we are products of billions of years of organic evolution here on our planet Earth. How can I relate myself to the facts I learned in medical school, that I consist of trillions of tiny cells that somehow communicate and cohere into an intergated whole that I feel is my "self"?
All of the massive evidence of the global scientific enterprise reveals that somewhere in the deep pulsations of the world there is inbuilt information, directives that act like barriers, currents, and channels to the flow of events, creating order, loose patterns, disorder, and varied melodies. Some mix of rules and happenstance has touched and placed each one of the octillions of atoms that currently reside in me, each atom itself a creation and residue of the cosmic origins.