Thursday, June 14, 2007
JSH: The search for truth
Pain and discovery have always gone hand in hand. After all, if it were easy, everybody would do it.
The real story of the path of humanity from the trees to the plains to cities and our modern world is filled with a lot of pain from a lot of people who will never be named.
They suffered so that we could live a different, hopefully better life, and most of them died without ever making a mark beyond the knowledge they gained—and passed on.
Who invented glass? What was the name of the first human being that made fire? Or the first ones who were brave enough to use natural fire rather than run from it like the other animals?
They died a long time ago, and there was no immortality for them in their discovery.
We discover because that is who we are. It is as natural for human beings to learn as it is to breathe, but it is a painful process.
For me the greatest disappointment in the modern mathematical community is in what I see as a lack of humanity, a retrograde movement, a recidivism, against the search for truth.
And why?
I think it's for jobs. I think that a modern mathematician today would rather lie about prime numbers than endanger research funding by telling the truth. And that way that professor can keep money for HIS kids. He can buy his wife some comfort. Pay his mortgage and to him that is more than enough reason.
And that is what makes him less than human.
What good is it to give that kid a meal and a home and take away the future?
If a man like these professors were facing fire, would he have run away, would we be here today?
Prometheus angered the gods in Greek legend by daring to challenge them, and bring knowledge to a hungry race, and in so doing he was punished.
We who discover are the children of Prometheus. It is our fate to be forever punished for the gift of knowledge.
But we do it anyway.
There is always a challenge. There are always anti-humans who create the battles and make the wars necessary as their parasitic nature demands it because without it doing it they cannot feed their children.
They cannot feed their children on truth.
But the progress of this planet depends on those who not only search for fire, they embrace it, and in the burning, the pain, the misery, and in the blindness of that light that forces its way through you, you learn that no matter what may come and all that will go, this time, and in this place you stood where greatness stood before, and on the shoulders of giants you rode.
The world will forget. It always does.
But its memory is not the reason, and the gods punished Prometheus and his children not for some simple thoughts of creatures they disdained.
They punished them for daring…and that was always enough.
The real story of the path of humanity from the trees to the plains to cities and our modern world is filled with a lot of pain from a lot of people who will never be named.
They suffered so that we could live a different, hopefully better life, and most of them died without ever making a mark beyond the knowledge they gained—and passed on.
Who invented glass? What was the name of the first human being that made fire? Or the first ones who were brave enough to use natural fire rather than run from it like the other animals?
They died a long time ago, and there was no immortality for them in their discovery.
We discover because that is who we are. It is as natural for human beings to learn as it is to breathe, but it is a painful process.
For me the greatest disappointment in the modern mathematical community is in what I see as a lack of humanity, a retrograde movement, a recidivism, against the search for truth.
And why?
I think it's for jobs. I think that a modern mathematician today would rather lie about prime numbers than endanger research funding by telling the truth. And that way that professor can keep money for HIS kids. He can buy his wife some comfort. Pay his mortgage and to him that is more than enough reason.
And that is what makes him less than human.
What good is it to give that kid a meal and a home and take away the future?
If a man like these professors were facing fire, would he have run away, would we be here today?
Prometheus angered the gods in Greek legend by daring to challenge them, and bring knowledge to a hungry race, and in so doing he was punished.
We who discover are the children of Prometheus. It is our fate to be forever punished for the gift of knowledge.
But we do it anyway.
There is always a challenge. There are always anti-humans who create the battles and make the wars necessary as their parasitic nature demands it because without it doing it they cannot feed their children.
They cannot feed their children on truth.
But the progress of this planet depends on those who not only search for fire, they embrace it, and in the burning, the pain, the misery, and in the blindness of that light that forces its way through you, you learn that no matter what may come and all that will go, this time, and in this place you stood where greatness stood before, and on the shoulders of giants you rode.
The world will forget. It always does.
But its memory is not the reason, and the gods punished Prometheus and his children not for some simple thoughts of creatures they disdained.
They punished them for daring…and that was always enough.
# posted by James Harris @ 03:32 
