Why do we NEED a catastrophe?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – an atomic Physics laboratory – has been in news recently for their new far-reaching experiment of deciphering the basic fabric of our universe by smashing otherwise innocuous protons together at very high speeds.

However, the news has been taken very differently in different parts of the world. In Andhra Pradesh, a girl committed suicide on September 11 fearing that the world will end as a result of the ongoing experiment in Geneva.

Scientists suggest that there is a miniscule possibility of something like that happening. The possibility would might only be 1%, but let us for a moment consider, what if the same possibility would have been a large number, say 70%. Then there would certainly be a palpable change in people’s behaviour; their perception about themselves and others.

For instance, not having more than a few years to live, and with chances of pardon remote, a significant number of death row inmates become more at peace within and the world. Some turn to philosophy or religion but very few attempt suicide or take on a ‘how-does-it-matter-any-more’ attitude.

But consider if scientists told us there was a 100% certain chance of total destruction. Very rarely do people walking to their deaths rant and rave. Victims of war, religious persecution or political hangings almost always believe there is a higher ideal to die for.

Funnily enough, 100% chance of death is exactly what we face in life! Yet what is it that stops us from gaining that same insight?

The day we realise that we are not going to live forever will liberate us from a life wasted in anticipating a death we do not like to believe in.

Philosophy (inspired by William James Durant)

Is it true, that there is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain??

"Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt." -Bacon

So much of our life is meaningless and futile; we strive with the chaos about us and within; but we would believe all the while that there is something vital and significant in us, could we but decipher our own souls.
Science always seems to advance, while philosophy always seems to lose ground. This is because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good & evil, beauty & ugliness, order & freedom, life & death. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. Philosophy is the hypothetical interpretation of the unknown or of the inexactly known, it is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvellous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters: the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored.

Perception (borrowed)

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one can be certain. And yet there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway train comes rushing down the track, and the snowflake will fall, as it will. How can this be? If
nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple.
Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given-so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is-and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful.
In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run fun to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.