Nick Irving’s Reviews > Dinosaur in a Haystack > Status Update

My heart leaps up then I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

King Lear's tragic error, which shall lead to blinding, madness, and death, lies in not recognizing that silence - overt nothing - can embody the deepest and most important meaning of all.

Nothing will come of nothing.

Thoughtless adherence to fashion can blind us to the permanent value of things unnoticed or abandoned as outdated... Judge by quality and engagement with the central ideas of science, not by employment of the maximally fashionable machinery or jargon.

The world is indifferent to our hopes - and fire burns whether we like it or not.

"If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
. . .
"A person who ignores accumulate wisdom perishes in his own thin web."

If buttercups buzzed after the bee
If boats were on land, churches at sea
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows
If cats were chased into holes by the mouse
Then all the world would be upside down

An old Latin proverb tells us to "beware the man of only one book" - cave ab homine unius libri.

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compressing arising from the traditionary faith and human interests on the other. Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them must take place.

A luminous star of the same density as the earth, but with a diameter 250 times greater than that of the sun, would not allow any of its light to reach us, by virtue of its own gravitational attraction. It is therefore possible that the largest luminous bodies in the universe are, for this reason, invisible.