THE HAPPINESS OF ATOMS
1.
According to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “the father of modern rocket science,”
in order for the earth to thrive every atom must be happy. “It is the organic
need and right of all atoms not to feel torment but to exist in peace and
happiness,” he wrote in 1934. And, “When the wrong path of humanity leads
it to a wild, destructive state, the atoms suffer much grief.”
2.
“You may say, But are there not natural disasters that sweep away this
happiness in a moment, as a broom sweeps away garbage?
Planets and suns explode like bombs. What life can resist it!
But I answer you, the lives of atoms arise many times.”
3.
He was born in the small Russian village of Izhevskoye, in 1857. At the age
of 10, he contracted scarlet fever which left him bedridden for many months
and hard of hearing. The village school refused to take him back. He studied
the books in his father’s library, and later in the central library of Moscow
where he lived in a small, drafty room and made experiments with
quicksilver and sulphuric acid. “I was happy with my ideas and my diet of
brown bread did not dampen my spirits.”
4.
But what is an atom? Werner Heisenberg said, “Atoms are not things. They
are only tendencies.” And Neils Bohr contended, “Everything we call real is
made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” To Max Planck, “There is
no matter as such—mind is the matrix of all matter.”
5.
“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we
can imagine.” (J.B.S. Haldane).
6.
Gentleness of lamps at night. Of inlets and coves, of secret edges. Wild
gentleness of the antiparticle, of the queerness of touch, the surveilled, the
wandering, the lost, the non-existent. Vagrant gentleness. Radical,
insubordinate, unsettled. The body’s cells in their most gentle captivity.
Basket nests, seeds. Quiet gentleness of the torn, the broken.
7.
Dear H.,
It appears to me that the “real” is an empty, meaningless category whose
monstrous importance lies only in the fact that I can do certain things in it
and not others. When I was five, my father showed me a compass. That its
needle behaved in a determined way independent of events or direct touch,
made a lasting impression on me of something deeply hidden. Our deepest
and most beautiful experiences are of the mysterious.
Yours,
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
8.
In his last years, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky contemplated the beauty of the
pursuit of light.
“My life has given me neither bread nor power. But I have drawn close to
atoms that think and love, that live imprisoned in stone, air, water, that
sleep with no awareness of time and live in the moment, that are aware of the
past and paint a picture of the future, that feel pain and pleasure. Though there
is the death of the body, atoms do not die.”
He died in Kaluga, Russia, at the age of 78, on September 19, 1935.
by Laurie Scheck
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