Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal
Abstract
Since the Enlightenment, scientific inquiry has shown that the immensities of time and space humans have always sensed, worshipped, and feared are not immune to measurement. Despite the anxieties of a variety of “establishments” through the years, for many people, measurement and greater understanding has not stolen creation’s wonder, but rather increased it. Quantitative science gives us an ability to put numbers on extreme quantities, whether on the vast scale of interstellar or intergalactic distances, geological or cosmological time, or the micro-scale of tiny probabilities. Yet we have no natural intuition for such numbers. If we don’t make an effort to train ourselves to appreciate them, they tend to either drift in one ear and out the other, or to be actively rejected as failing a “common sense” test. In this paper we explore several areas of natural and social science where scale is essential to comprehension, and where typical human myopia about scale has a limiting effect. The illuminating voices of the humanities, with the freedom to create elegant analogies and to play with points of view, time and space in texts of all types, helped our ancestors to cope with scales they could not yet understand rationally. The voices of the humanities can also help our descendants to cope with scales that we can now understand scientifically but not viscerally…this interpretive role matters, because the questions we face as a planet demand a grasp of the very small, the very long, and the very distant.
Keywords
Humanities Symposium
Recommended Citation
Niedzwiecki, John and Streams, Meg
(2014)
"Generations Enough, and Time,"
Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal: Vol. 5, Article 10.
Available at:
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium_journal/vol5/iss1/10