Excerpt taken from Sagan’s ‘The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark’- (which it certainly is!!!)
“Our current view of the silent world of [James Clerk] Maxwell’s varying electric and magnetic vectors is described by Richard Feynman in these words:
[i]‘Try to imagine what the electric and magnetic fields look like at present in the space of this lecture room. First of all, there is a steady magnetic field; it comes from the currents in the interior of the earth – that is, the earth’s steady magnetic field. Then there are some irregular, nearly static electric fields produced perhaps by electric charges generated by friction as various people move about in their chairs and rub their coat sleeves against the chair arms. Then there are other magnetic fields produced by oscillating currents in the electrical wiring – fields which vary at a frequency of 60 cycles per second, in synchronism with the generator at Boulder Dam. But more interesting are the electric and magnetic fields varying at much higher frequencies. For instance, as light travels from window to floor and wall to wall, there are little wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields moving along at 186,000 miles per second. Then there are also infrared waves traveling from the warm foreheads to the cold blackboard. And we have forgotten the ultraviolet light, the X rays, and the radiowaves traveling through the room.
Flying across the room are electromagnetic waves which carry music of a jazz band. There are waves modulated by a series of impulses representing pictures or events going on in other parts of the world, or of imaginary aspirins dissolving in imaginary stomachs. To demonstrate the reality of these waves it is only necessary to turn on electronic equipment that converts these waves into pictures and sounds.
If we go further into detail to analyze even the smallest wiggles, there are tiny electromagnetic waves that have come into the room from enormous distances. There are now tiny oscillations of the electric field, whose crests are separated by a distance of one foot, that have come from millions of miles away, transmitted to the earth from the Mariner[2] space craft which has just passed Venus. Its signals carry summaries of information it has picked up about the planets (information obtained from electromagnetic waves that traveled from the planet to the space craft).
There are very tiny wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields that are waves which originated billions of light-years away – from galaxies in the remotest corners of the universe. That this is true has been found by “filling the room with wires” – by building antennas as large as this room. Such radiowaves have been detected from places in space beyond the range of the greatest optical telescopes. Even they, the optical telescopes, are simply gatherers of electromagnetic waves. What we call the stars are only inferences, inferences drawn from the only physical reality we have yet gotten from them – from a careful study of the unendingly complex undulations of the electric and magnetic fields reaching us on earth.
There is, of course, more: the fields produced by lightning miles away; the fields of the charged cosmic ray particles as they zip through the room, and more and more. What a complicated thing is the electric field in the space around you.’"[/i]
Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume II, The Electromagnetic Field
Amazing to me, truly amazing…though I will have to read it at least a few more times in order to really IMAGINE it. There is so very much that most of us do not even know, let alone comprehend, about the universe (except perhaps for a chosen few, relatively speaking). We don’t even take the time to try to even imagine what our feeble brains are not as yet capable of showing us, perhaps in thousands of years they may; perhaps not. But still, they manage, through our imaginings, to somehow invent or create wonderful things that take us closer to the truth, that open our eyes to reality. The more I read about the workings of our universe, the more I stand in awe of it – it all just whets my appetite to wonder and to seek more…and more…!!!
Science really IS the candle in the dark…no matter what the area of science. Science really is the true magic that transcends any kind of absurd ‘magic’ that is out there.
This what I meant, in part, when I wrote: …“I sit within the confines of my imagination. What I sense and what I know can only beg me pause. So far beyond and vastly unbeknownst to me - Lie swirling mysteries of wonder, such that I shall never see”! How can we not want to go in search of these wonders?!
I also feel that science and philosophy are like kissing cousins, if not closer. The more we know of our world and of ourselves – how can we not want to imagine more, ask more questions, search out the truth, wonder about what is ‘hidden behind the veil’? They touch and they are in harmony with one another.
But these are just my musings and my opinion.