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The Beauty of Knowledge
Although reality is very complex and the human brain prefers simplicity, reality is far more wonderful than simple stories can ever be.
When Isaac Newton explained the optics behind the phenomenon of the rainbow, the poet John Keats was troubled by the habit of science to walk in and show how things worked instead of being content to gawp uncomprehendingly or being satisfied with banal fairytales.
Keats wrote his poem Lamia to express his discomfort and within it are the lines:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow
(For Keats the word “philosophy” did not carry its current sense of an isolated and overly-abstract discipline but rather it meant what we today call “science.”)
Bottom line: for Keats, understanding something was to rob it of its magic.
