Astrophysicist Weighs in on Wonder
Oct. 30, 2006 — -- Wisdom begins in wonder -- Socrates
These days we wonder about many things. We wonder whether we will arrive at work on time. We wonder whether the recipe for corn muffins we got off the Internet will work. We wonder whether we will run out of fuel before reaching the next gas station.
As an intransitive verb, "wonder" is just another word in the sentence. But as a noun, with the exception of "The Boy Wonder" moniker for Batman's sidekick, Robin, the word rises to express one of our highest capacities for human emotion.
Most of us have felt wonder at one time or another. You come upon a place or a thing or an idea that defies explanation.
Meanwhile, you behold a level of beauty and majesty that leaves you without words. And your sense of awe draws you into to a mental state of silent stupor.
What's remarkable is not that humans are endowed with this capacity to feel, but that very different forces can stimulate these same emotions within us all.
The reverent musings of a scientist at the boundary of what is known and unknown in the universe -- on the brink of cosmic discovery -- greatly resembles the thoughts expressed by a person steeped in religious reverence.
And for what is surely the goal of most, if not all artists, some creative works leave the viewer without words, only feelings that test the limits of our emotional spectrum.
In nearly all cases, the experience is largely spiritual and amounts to more than can be absorbed all at once, requiring persistent reflection on what the encounter means and on our relationship to it.
In this trinity of human endeavor -- science, religion and art -- each lays powerful claim to our feelings of wonder, which derives from its ability to embrace the mysterious. And where mystery is absent, there can be no wonder.
Some wonders may transcend our personal measures of what is possible in this world but do not fall beyond ourselves as a species.
Great works of engineering and architecture can force their visitors to take pause, out of respect for what is the highest intersection of science and art.
Projects of this scale have the power to transform the human landscape, announcing loudly to ourselves and to the universe that we have mastered the forces of nature that formerly bound us to an itinerant life in search of food and shelter and nothing else.
Alas, new wonders supplant old wonders, imbued by modern mysteries instead of old. We must ensure this remains forever true, lest our culture stagnate through time and space.
Two thousand years ago, long before we understood how and why the planets moved the way they do in the night sky, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy could not contain his emotional reverence when he wrote:
"When I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia."
People no longer wax poetic about the orbital paths of planets. That's a good thing. Isaac Newton solved that mystery three centuries ago with his universal law of gravitation -- now taught in high school physics class.
A simple, yet persistent reminder that on the ever-advancing frontier of discovery, on Earth and in the heavens, the wonders of nature and the wonders of human creativity know no bounds, requiring us, from time to time, to reassess what deserves to be called the most wondrous among them.
© Neil deGrasse Tyson, October 2006. Written for ABCNews.com
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as director of its Hayden Planetarium. Among other activities, he is host of PBS's NOVA scienceNOW, and this winter will see the release of his latest book "Death By Black Hole, and Other Cosmic Quandaries."