"We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything." - Thomas Edison
Forgive my philosophy here, but after a long time the philosopher in me is awake and wants to write something. Don,t frown if you don't get the gist or have no idea on what am I talking on, after all the thoughts are intangible or I would have given you the option to mould it as you like. But you can't, as you can't see it in the first place........it's all invisible, isn't it!!! but still I hope you'll read it full, I say you'll enjoy it....
So the question is, what is invisible? There is more of it than you think, actually. Everything, I would say, everything that matters except every thing, and except matter. We can see matter. But we can't see what's the matter. As in this cryptic sentence I found in the Guardian recently. "The marriage suffered a setback in 1965 when the husband was killed by the wife."
So we can see the stars and the planets. But we can't see what holds them apart, or what draws them together. With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things. We can't see into the engine room. We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty. And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. And you can't see energy.
Forgive my philosophy here, but after a long time the philosopher in me is awake and wants to write something. Don,t frown if you don't get the gist or have no idea on what am I talking on, after all the thoughts are intangible or I would have given you the option to mould it as you like. But you can't, as you can't see it in the first place........it's all invisible, isn't it!!! but still I hope you'll read it full, I say you'll enjoy it....
So the question is, what is invisible? There is more of it than you think, actually. Everything, I would say, everything that matters except every thing, and except matter. We can see matter. But we can't see what's the matter. As in this cryptic sentence I found in the Guardian recently. "The marriage suffered a setback in 1965 when the husband was killed by the wife."
So we can see the stars and the planets. But we can't see what holds them apart, or what draws them together. With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things. We can't see into the engine room. We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty. And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. And you can't see energy.
So everything that matters, that's important, is invisible. One slightly silly thing that's invisible is this story, which is invisible to you. And I'm now going to make it visible to you. I heard it in one of John Lloyd's talk. It's about an M.P. called Geoffrey Dickens.
The late Geoffrey Dickens, M.P. was attending a fete in his constituency. Wherever he went, at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness. Try as he might, he couldn't get away from her. A few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him, had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph. After her name, written in brackets was the apt description.....horse face. "I've misjudged this women." thought Mr. Dickens. "Not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness, she turns it to her advantage. A photo is not enough." So he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in. And on the photograph, he wrote with a flourish, "To Horse Face, with love from Geoffrey Dickens, M.P." After it had been sent off his secretary said to him, "Did you get that letter from the woman at the fete? I wrote Horse Face on her, so you'd remember who she was."
I bet he thought he wished he was invisible, don't you?
So, one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we can't see we also can't understand. Gravity is one thing that we can't see, and which we don't understand. It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest. And nobody really knows what it is or why it's there. For what it's worth, Sir Issac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. That's what he thought he was there for. So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know.
Consciousness. I see all your faces. I have no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that incredible that we can't read each other's minds. But we can touch each other, taste each other perhaps, if we get close enough. But we can't read each other's minds. I find that quite astonishing.
The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful. Remind you of anyone? Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. And I've found a very useful new word, ignostic. Okay? I'm an ignostic. I refuse to be drawn on the question of whether God exists, until somebody properly defines the terms!!!
The stars by day. I always think that's fascinating. The universe disappears. The more light there is, the less you can see.
Time, nobody can see time. I don't know if you know this. Modern physics, there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist. Because it's to inconvenient for the figures. It's much easier if it's not really there. You can't see the future, obviously. And you can't see the past, except in your memory.
One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see, my younger sister asked me this the other day, he said, "Brother, can you remember what I was like when I was two?" And I said "Yes." And she said, "Why can't I?". Isn't that extraordinary? You can not remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three. Which is great news for psychoanalysts. Because otherwise they'd be out of a job. Because that's where all the stuff happens........ that makes you who you are.
Another thing you can't see is the grid, on which we hang. This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. You can see it in skin and this kind of stuff. Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff. But every cell in your body is replaced at some point. Tastebuds, every 10 days or so. Livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer. A spine takes several years. But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago. The question is, who, then, are we? What are we? What is this thing that we hang on, that is actually us?
There is so many things that -- Light. You can't see light. When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. I find that extraordinary, not to be able to see light, not to be able to see darkness.
Electricity, you can't see that. Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity. They don't. Nobody knows what it is. You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light when you turn the light on. They don't. Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. Galaxies, 100 billion of them, estimated in the universe. 100 billion. How many can we see? Five. Five, out of the 100 billion galaxies, with the naked eye. And one of them is quite difficult to see unless you've got very good eyesight.
And I've come to the conclusion because you've asked this other question, "What's another thing you can't see?" The point, most of us. What's the point? You can't see a point. It's, by definition, dimensionless, like an electron, oddly enough.
But, the point, what I've got it down to is there are only two questions really worth asking. "Why are we here?" and "What should we do about it while we are? And to help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th Century. One a mathematician and an engineer, and the other a poet.
The first is Ludvig Vitgenštajn who said, "I don't know why we are here. But I'm pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."
And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, who said, "We are here on earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've no idea."
