Disregard any idea you have of the pop-cultural image of scientist. This is about what a scientist actually is, or could be.
 |
Sketching. I was also practicing Chinese on the same canvas but w/e you'll probably think it's aesthetic. |
I think that most people tend to vastly underestimate just how good modern scientists working at the cutting edge are at what they do. Set aside the profit motives, the murky dealings and vicious crab-bucket rivalries of academia, the chokehold major publishers and journals have on academic publishing, etc... for a moment ignore all that mud splattered on the pristine white lab coat and allow yourself to appreciate the crystalline purity and sort of fractal enormity of the knowledge which we have attained. We know an unfathomable amount about our world. We can explain what we are made of down to the sub-subatomic scale, at minimum. We understand how humans came to be, we know the history of earth on a geologic scale, we know of times before the written word, before oral record. We have a reasonably good idea of what the literal first moments of the Universe probably looked like. We know about cosmic prisons from which there is literally no escape, have located them, and have recently managed to take pictures of them. As the title suggests, this isn't meant to be an "I Fucking Love Science" type screed—as much as I am in awe of the power and majesty of science I also live in deep fear of the idiots who are put in charge of it—but if you contemplate the literally mythic scope of our achievements... well, it's a mighty hubristic age we live in.
Anyways, that's just one of the big themes of the Hex.
