January 26, 2018
If you want to know where you are, just look at your feet twice.
This reminds me of Science, and Science—given the current cultural climate—reminds me of its opposite: Politics.
Looking at your own feet twice is the raw material of Science, because it is an immediate, elemental, fundamental, empirical way to figure out where you are. It has proven effective in all twenty-four zones and in both hemispheres as a reliable index of physical location.
This practice can spool out into a sense of wonder (I’m standing here? Now?) which is what drives us to polish pure fact out of the cosmic blur.
“Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is. Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” – Richard Feynman
So, yes, we have followed our feet into Science, the greatest engine of information in human history.
We’ll get to the politics part when we get to the politics part. Let’s first savor the wonder that finds facts.
So let’s take some steps and stand by: we want to know where we are, so we’re gonna just look at our feet twice.
