This thread is a bit ambiguous, but I guess that's the point. Hopefully it will be interesting and not fail miserably. I wanted to create a general repository for things that you consider to be "profound". Thoughts, quotes, ideas, conjecture...you name it. Things that just amaze and astound you, and serve to compel the spinning of your brain's little gears like nothing else.
For me two studies tend to do this more than any other: physics and biology. Astronomy and genetics, respectively, to be more precise. The concepts behind these two studies would definitely have to be the language of God, in my opinion. They boggle the mind. So I will start off with a biology/genetics quote that kind of boggles MY mind every time I hear it.
"As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?"
- Erasmus Darwin, 1794 (grandfather of Charles Darwin)
To presume that Erasmus was eluding to the functional concept and structure of DNA approximately 100 years before the isolation of basic nucleic acids and roughly 160 years before scientists using highly advanced lab equipment finally made the discovery is fascinating, to say the least. Many think his use of the phrase 'living filaments' was allegorical and unintentional (describing a 'linear species' and not an actual chemical component), but it's weirdly accurate enough to make me wonder. Especially considering his theories on the natural sciences and evolution, and the famous work of his grandson 60 years later involving The Origin of Species.
It's also startling to realize exactly how much people have known about the world and for how long. I think a lot of us tend to think science started in the 1900s and before that we were stumbling, uninformed idiots. Consider Aristotle, for example. 2,300 years ago his ponderances of inductive reasoning, epistemology, medicine, and the now-classic argument of the egg and the chicken (or the acorn and the oak tree) could rationally be considered the precursor of modern genetics. (Max Delbruck once joked, even, that he should be awarded a posthumous Nobel for the discovery of DNA.)
So anyway, what do you consider profound?
For me two studies tend to do this more than any other: physics and biology. Astronomy and genetics, respectively, to be more precise. The concepts behind these two studies would definitely have to be the language of God, in my opinion. They boggle the mind. So I will start off with a biology/genetics quote that kind of boggles MY mind every time I hear it.
"As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?"
- Erasmus Darwin, 1794 (grandfather of Charles Darwin)
To presume that Erasmus was eluding to the functional concept and structure of DNA approximately 100 years before the isolation of basic nucleic acids and roughly 160 years before scientists using highly advanced lab equipment finally made the discovery is fascinating, to say the least. Many think his use of the phrase 'living filaments' was allegorical and unintentional (describing a 'linear species' and not an actual chemical component), but it's weirdly accurate enough to make me wonder. Especially considering his theories on the natural sciences and evolution, and the famous work of his grandson 60 years later involving The Origin of Species.
It's also startling to realize exactly how much people have known about the world and for how long. I think a lot of us tend to think science started in the 1900s and before that we were stumbling, uninformed idiots. Consider Aristotle, for example. 2,300 years ago his ponderances of inductive reasoning, epistemology, medicine, and the now-classic argument of the egg and the chicken (or the acorn and the oak tree) could rationally be considered the precursor of modern genetics. (Max Delbruck once joked, even, that he should be awarded a posthumous Nobel for the discovery of DNA.)
So anyway, what do you consider profound?
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