The more I learn, the less I know.

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree.

Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.

The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

-Richard Feynman

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Honestly geometry's pretty dicey, as are numbers larger than 1.

Bonus panel

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Just one more collider, bro. Please, bro

Nothing squashes wonder quite like asking about the nature of the universe and someone answering "a flying old man did it".

Solving too many mysteries is not a complaint I have for the scientists... Not having free energy yet is

I am utterly confused by this comic, it makes sense and at the same time it doesn't

I feel like this comic exists as a bit of catharsis for the scientific folks, but I gotta say I appreciated the perspective as someone who's struggled with this, philosophically.

I feel like "pop science" in particular just tries to say "Believe our experts. We figured out the right answer. What people thought for centuries was vast and full of wonder is in fact a gray room, and opinions to the contrary are uneducated and misinformed. Your artistic renderings and sci-fi is wrong."

That smugness can be seen as trying to eliminate wonder and solve the joy out of things to flaunt one's own intelligence...which seems to be rewarded heavily by our culture.

For those of us who didn't get the opportunity for university, I wish the wonderous parts of science were more exposed.

Sadly it's really hard to find that stuff among mountains of clickbait telling you they used the super collider to build a DOOM-esque wormhole to Hell. Lmao

Can I has an afterlife?

Science is a candle in the dark, it just exposes all of the cool shit to explore in the room that were hidden in the black.

A little bit in chemistry, too. But usually in the "oh, that's bad. Let's not do that" category.

I read her in the voice of an evil genius.