Monday, June 14, 2010

clouds not clocks


Almeria 2008 from Vicente + Sara on Vimeo.

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, this morning.  It is lovely, contemplative.  According to Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, the world was once divided into clouds and clocks:

Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

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