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Description

Knowledge is a structured affair, individual facts and observations fit neatly into place amongst other facts and observations. The sky above arches over the earth underfoot, and our personal environment is nestled between the two. The road to the center of town runs this way, and the road to school runs that way. Then we discover that we can travel from downtown straight to school, without having to come back home first, because town, school, and home maintain a structured existence in our map of the world. As our knowledge expands into a scientific understanding of the world, we learn that the earth underfoot is a sphere of enormous dimensions, and that the blue sky extends only some few miles overhead under the boundless black void of outer space. We build up our understanding of the world from the center outwards, gradually expanding the world of our immediate experience between earth and sky, into a much larger space of the globe of the world suspended in the void of space. And the expansion of knowledge occurs also inwards, from the large to the small, as we learn of the microscopic world of germs and viruses, and the sub-microscopic world of molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles, all the way to the quantum fluctuations of space-time. Science seems to offer an impartial objective view of the world, unlike the egocentric perspective of our infantile experience. We begin to develop the impression that the world revealed by science is a world of objective reality that represents a kind of absolute truth. The physical world revealed by science is what is real.

Steven Lehar: cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webs…

All images used are royalty free:
pixabay.com/en/mountains-road-…

pixabay.com/en/boat-coast-isla…

Description

Knowledge is a structured affair, individual facts and observations fit neatly into place amongst other facts and observations. The sky above arches over the earth underfoot, and our personal environment is nestled between the two. The road to the center of town runs this way, and the road to school runs that way. Then we discover that we can travel from downtown straight to school, without having to come back home first, because town, school, and home maintain a structured existence in our map of the world. As our knowledge expands into a scientific understanding of the world, we learn that the earth underfoot is a sphere of enormous dimensions, and that the blue sky extends only some few miles overhead under the boundless black void of outer space. We build up our understanding of the world from the center outwards, gradually expanding the world of our immediate experience between earth and sky, into a much larger space of the globe of the world suspended in the void of space. And the expansion of knowledge occurs also inwards, from the large to the small, as we learn of the microscopic world of germs and viruses, and the sub-microscopic world of molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles, all the way to the quantum fluctuations of space-time. Science seems to offer an impartial objective view of the world, unlike the egocentric perspective of our infantile experience. We begin to develop the impression that the world revealed by science is a world of objective reality that represents a kind of absolute truth. The physical world revealed by science is what is real.

Steven Lehar: cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webs…

All images used are royalty free:
pixabay.com/en/mountains-road-…

pixabay.com/en/boat-coast-isla…