*screams exestentially*

The more I learn, the less I know.
- Anyone who starts to think that they are an expert on something really needs to have the top end literature on the thing nearby. Even if you're reasonably competent, you won't be making it through the titles of most of these papers without googling several of the words.
  
  The thing is.
  I know and I also expect from others that NO ONE is an expert anywhere.
  However most of people do think there expertise is sufficient to be called like that.
  While I am struggling through multiple dilemmas because the uknowns and complexity of everything is unbearable versus the self proclaimed experts are joyfully neglecting details....

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree.
Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
-Richard Feynman
- https://xkcd.com/877/
- Art and science are two sides of the same coin. You cannot be a good scientist if you are not a bit of an artist.
  https://edgy.app/where-art-and-science-intersect
- Well said. He sounds like a smart fellow.
  
  Indeed, he seems like a fine man.

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Honestly geometry's pretty dicey, as are numbers larger than 1.

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Just one more collider, bro. Please, bro

Nothing squashes wonder quite like asking about the nature of the universe and someone answering "a flying old man did it".

Solving too many mysteries is not a complaint I have for the scientists... Not having free energy yet is
- Not having free energy yet is
  Have you not noticed the bright ball of gas that lights up the sky during the day?
  It bathes the earth in free energy.
  
  Nothing is free. Eventually Huītzilōpōchtli will consume the Earth to settle the debt we own him.
  
  Yeah, but you have to put energy into getting that energy.
  
  That's why we've been trapping all this extra energy! Free real estate baby. It's just good economics.
  ...I've just been informed that DC is now underwater
  
  Failing that, you can always hook up to the neighbors power meter;
  
  Only for the next 5 billion years! And then what???
  
  I wonder how much sunlight we can convert into stored energy until we are non-trivially detracting from the amount of energy that reaches the earth's surface.
  It's probably an absurd proportion of solar panel coverage.
- nothing can be free in a capitalist society
  unless you mean perpetual motion/magic energy in which case that was solved hundreds of years ago. It can't be done

Can I has an afterlife?
- No. Go make your own.
  
  Error: Failed to create item: Human Soul
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I am utterly confused by this comic, it makes sense and at the same time it doesn't
- It's about the evolving picture of the universe over the past 300 years and how so much about that picture changed so quickly and is still left with very big open questions.
  
  Why think when you can just say it is God's magic 😎

I feel like this comic exists as a bit of catharsis for the scientific folks, but I gotta say I appreciated the perspective as someone who's struggled with this, philosophically.
I feel like "pop science" in particular just tries to say "Believe our experts. We figured out the right answer. What people thought for centuries was vast and full of wonder is in fact a gray room, and opinions to the contrary are uneducated and misinformed. Your artistic renderings and sci-fi is wrong."
That smugness can be seen as trying to eliminate wonder and solve the joy out of things to flaunt one's own intelligence...which seems to be rewarded heavily by our culture.
For those of us who didn't get the opportunity for university, I wish the wonderous parts of science were more exposed.
Sadly it's really hard to find that stuff among mountains of clickbait telling you they used the super collider to build a DOOM-esque wormhole to Hell. Lmao

Science is a candle in the dark, it just exposes all of the cool shit to explore in the room that were hidden in the black.

A little bit in chemistry, too. But usually in the "oh, that's bad. Let's not do that" category.

I read her in the voice of an evil genius.