Go geek

When I consider the vast array of discoveries that have been made in the history of mankind I marvel at what we humans have figured out. If I had access to the very same information that Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Pasteur or Curie or Brahms had I'd still lack, even granted 1000 undisturbed years and a computer, the slightest inkling of the mechanics of quarks, germs, genes, plate tectonics, nuclear fusion, photo synthesis or how to compose a symphony. But I'm oh so grateful that each of them, and countless others, one day smacked their forehead and yelped, "Aha!" Because I just can't get over how cool this world is. How all the bits and pieces work together to produce such fabulous results. And while I don't have to understand the color spectrum to appreciate a rainbow, it's all the more intriguing to understand what engineers such precise splendor. There is beauty in knowledge, in the culmination of century upon century of wonder and wondering by people in every corner of our planet whose investigations in big and small ways connect in a brilliant web that both illuminates and mystifies as it grows, like gravity which contracts our universe even as, paradoxically, dark matter expands it. In 10,000 more years of brainpower we'll have discovered only how much more there is yet to uncover. And I still will not have figured out Algebra I.