Natural Philosophy and Some Thoughts

In Newton’s time they didn’t use the term ‘science’. Rather, the prevailing term was ‘natural philosophy’, the branch of knowledge explaining and exploring natural phenomena. Now, I am not going into the etymology of this term. What I am going to say is somewhat related to the feeling this old term gives me.

I am a strictly scientific person with a great passion for almost all type of art-forms. And the fundamental belief that drives me to all my pursuits is that, beauty is a ubiquitous entity. It can range from mathematical equation about natural facts to the wisdom of a poet writing about human hearts. And to me the sound of this term ‘natural philosophy’ gives this air of knowledge more concerning this ‘Beauty’.

Now look around. All the fascinating things you see started with a big bang. And recently I have learned to look into it in an interesting way-

After big bang there was a moment when all there was Hydrogen atoms and few laws of nature. And starting from there we have this immensely complicated universe. With Galaxies, Stars, ‘Superstars’, lay people like you and me, poetry, literature and every other conceivable thing. So, we see what even the simplest and almost mundane atoms of Hydrogen can do if you give it some 13 billion years!

Can't you feel that this interesting way of looking into all these scientific facts has some kind of literary value? And this value can actually add up to the collective ‘human wisdom’. And the first time I heard some scientist say it that way, actually gave me great excitement and pleasure in my heart. Yes, though I am a scientist, I have hearts; and not only a heart that pumps blood to my brain but also another heart that is emulated in my brain, in side all the billions of synapse connections of my neurons that makes this worthless collection of matters, that is the living body, have some feelings.

Now I think I am getting carried away with some sort of emotional impulses, because I happen to have emotions regarding science! Whatever…

I think already nobody is reading up to this passage of this article. So let me tell something more about looking into things in a way which, i think, has some literary values and some useful implications. It concerns creativity and narcissism. Two utterly unbearably pleasurable(?) disease I occasionally suffer from.

Let’s begin with one piece of wisdom I have finally found-

Do not try to explain any of your creative processes; you will only end up making a fool out of yourself.

And one thing I can say for sure, that narcissism hampers creativity a lot. It actually kills creativity. Once people start to say ‘how genius you are’ that is actually the 'death sentence' for your creative genius. You start to give importance to their words; you become narcissist, stop taking risks, stop exploring new ideas for the fear of failure and go for all the things that worked so well previously. And consequently you become some type of mediocre, or even worse 'non productive'.

Now here is a way of thinking that might ‘save your soul’…

Some of us write poems. You can look at it this way. All the words were already there in the language. What the poet did is, just found a way to arrange them, so that it feels good. I mean, it is the property of those selected ‘words’ that if you arrange them in that way it becomes, what we call, a piece of poetry. A particular person finds it by just some ‘lucky accidents’. Of course he, as a poet, was searching for it but it might happen that he never finds it. Same story goes for a Scientist looking for some underlying mathematics of a natural phenomenon. One can even think about the beginning of ‘Evolution’. Some chemicals combine in a particular form in some lucky accident and a whole era of ‘beauty’ starts! Same governing dynamics... every where!

Let’s not drift away into that direction and without wasting any more time make the final call-

Don’t be a narcissist. Whenever you have done something incredibly beautiful remember, you, as a person, have done nothing. The nature had this immense possibility to be formed in that particular beautiful form and it is an accident that you were involved in that process. And of course you want to be part, or at least be a witness, of these types of processes because it is an immensely pleasurable experience, worth living a meaningless life.

Live to the light.