From Disembodied to Empathetic
In an awesome lecture titled “The Disembodied Universe” in his book, The Accidental Universe, Alan Lightman says that: “What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices, we have uncovered a hidden reality.” We’ve learnt that time isn’t absolute, teeny tiny molecules encode the instructions to build life forms, and that matter behaves like both particles and waves! And then Lightman points out where all this knowledge is taking us: “It is an irony to me that the same science and technology that have brought us closer to nature by revealing these invisible worlds have also separated us from nature and from ourselves. Much of our contact with the world today is not an immediate, direct experience, but is instead mediated by various artificial devices such as televisions, cell phones, iPads, chat rooms, and mind-altering drugs.” Talking of how glued we are to o...