Subjectivity
"All things move and nothing remains still" -- Heraclitus
The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the universe, managed to make star catalogues and predict comets, Galileo, pressing his to a telescope, saw all the way to the moons of Jupiter.
Optical telescopes and the human eye are fundamentally limited; early astronomers were forced to gaze into telescopes for…
"The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A.S. Byatt
"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." Richard Powers
I had more fun doing this series than anything else in the past 3+ years here at the Fair. It was a unique opportunity and one that wouldn't have been possible without the blog format. I was able to start down a track and let it run as far as it would go. What seemed like a detour at times had a way of becoming a direct route so that, in the end, the meandering came to encircle epistemology, technology, and…