Quoth the engineer

“All of this is but a dream. Still, let us examine it with a few experiments.”

I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve sent with that as my ending quote. It’s almost tradition that the first time I ever email anyone that it is my ending quote. When I made my first post to the blog I felt that it would be fitting to include it in the post. I’m not sure if I’ve ever explained who said it and what I take it to mean before. So, since I am really struggling for ideas tonight I might as well attempt to spread enlightenment.

I came across the quote in the liner notes of a Billy Bragg CD. I doubt that too many people who read this (all, what, five of you) have a clue who Billy Bragg is. He’s a British folk singer, still hangs out with Michael Stipe a lot, and he was brought up in that great British coal miner socialist school of thought. He’s the only artist I’ve ever heard of whose entire purpose was ruined by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anyway, hidden on the album “Don’t try this at home” was this gem.

It’s a quote from Michael Faraday, another name that very few people will know. Except for electrical engineers who will immediately know who I am talking about. See, Faraday is effectively the first electrical engineer. He derived one of the four fundamental laws of electromagnetics and as a result had the unit of capacitance named after him (the farad for those who desperately need to know these things). When I was floating around London at one point in my life I came across of statue of him. No lie, this is probably the only statue to an engineer in existence on this planet. Obviously, this guy is one of my idols to begin with (an engineer with a statue) and now I get this great quote.

I consider it to be the motto of my life. When you look at the world around you there is no proof that anything that you see is real. We all assume that it is because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function. But you don’t really know. Everything is just perception and conjecture and attempts to give life a plot where one does not exist. At some point science becomes indistinguishable from magic. Read about sub-atomic particles sometimes, you’ll begin to wonder if there is any rhyme or reason to the universe. Or look at Hawking’s theory on how time will eventually flow backwards (which I will write about one of these days since it is my favorite theory in all of science). So when I look at the world it is with a sense of wonder and awe.

But just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try. And that’s the best part, I might not understand the world but I’m here and as long as I have the time I might as well make the effort to try to have this place make at least a modicum of sense. That’s my life in a nutshell, as strange as the world around me may be I’m going to try to figure it out.

Just a little insight into my quotes. Next week, I dissect Roddy Piper’s classic line, “Just when you think you know the answers, I change the questions.”