Making things easy

the universe as ecstasy

It’s not so easy to understand how the world works. For starters, “the world” is a big place. And, what’s more, there’s no reason to think that the world owes us any kind of explanation. The way the world actually works might be completely inaccessible to us, it might make no ‘sense’ whatsoever to human beings.

And yet the quest persists. People - scientists, philosophers, theologians, electricians, landscape gardeners - continue to insist on figuring out what works and how it works.

This isn’t always a quest for a grand theory of everything. Sometimes the quest has modest goals - like how to build a retaining wall that lasts. But it seems to me that no matter how grand the ambition is, the quest is always the same: we start with what works, we understand why it works, and then we extrapolate from there to some broader theory so that we can succeed with that thing in new situations.

And every now and again people stumble across things that seem, just, well, strange. Unthinkable. And in t…