While religion inspires exalted feelings, while music and poetry stir powerful emotions, while both enable us to transcend the limiting boundaries of human existence, science is said to merely provide intellectual stimulation, an arid desert compared to the flaming gardens that the spirit so yearns for.

I believe this is a much mistaken notion, for the marvels of nature that science reveals can inspire an equal sense of wonderment. The American scientist Michio Kaku who has done much to popularise science in his appearances on TV, once exclaimed that String Theory (which claims to be a Theory of Everything, a mother of all theories providing the ultimate explanation for all natural phenomena) is so beautiful it makes physicists like him want to weep for joy.

Now I am less thrilled by the abstractions of scientific theory than by the actual physical evidence provided by scientific instruments, such as the telescope and microscope. It is an inexpressible joy when I look at the photographs of our universe sent back by the Hubble Telescope, showing stars being born, showing events that took place billions of years ago in the incalculable distances of the cosmos and that are only now being sighted by us on planet earth. The sheer thought of the vastness of our universe brings a ‘shuddering awe’, in the words of the famous physicist Chandrasekar.

I am overcome by emotion when, from the very large, I am enabled by the same reliable instruments of science, to look at the very small—the world of the tiniest organisms, equipped with the complete machinery for survival and reproduction, and even further down the scale, to the cellular level, where I see the stage-by-stage development of cells, from their beginning as a solitary cell formed by sperm and egg, to their frenetic division and multiplication, their coming together to lay down the blueprint for the human form, their self-organisation, their meticulous self-sculpting to get rid of extraneous features such as tails and fins and hair, that the human being, now freed from its ancient ancestry, no longer needs. The whole process is so miraculous that like Michio Kaku I want to weep for joy.

I am overwhelmed with a child’s sense of breathless wonder when I see pictures provided by the ingenious device of the time-lapse camera that is able to track the day-by-day, even hour-by-hour growth of a plant. The plant seems to have an intelligence of its own as it moves about in slow deliberative search of sunlight or nutrients, finally and very purposefully staking its claim on a tree trunk or root by fastening its tendrils upon it. One can almost hear a territorial ‘This is mine now, so stay out!’

The American bishop Fulton Sheen once quipped that Science could never be as inspiring as religion with its glorious saints and martyrs, for ‘who would die for the Milky Way’? But aficionados like myself probably understand the pure exhilaration, when one witnesses the unfolding of Nature’s secrets, one by one. Einstein calls it a ‘cosmic feeling’, while the philosopher Wittgenstein describes it as nothing less than ‘jaw-dropping dumbfoundment’, a speechless state approaching mystical ecstasy.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...