A Tremendous Mess of Waves

“It's kind of incredible, because when I'm looking at you, someone standing at my left can see someone who is standing at my right. . . . completely undisturbed . . . So that there is this tremendous mess of waves [photons] . . . all through the same space, all these things are going on at the same time . . . there's not only information of my vision of you, but information from Moscow radio, being broadcast at the present moment and the singing of someone from Peru. All the radio waves are just the same kind of waves only longer waves. And there's the radar from an airplane which is looking at the ground to figure out where it is, which is coming through this room at the same time. Plus the x-rays, cosmic rays, and all the other things which are the same kind of waves, but shorter, faster [higher frequency], or longer, slower [lower frequency]. It's exactly the same thing. So this big field, this area of irregular motions of this electric field, this vibration, contains this tremendous amount of information. And it's all really there. . . . you've got to stop and think about it to really get the pleasure of the complexity, the inconceivable nature of nature.”
- Richard Feynman (https://youtu.be/eqtuNXWT0mo?t=37m40s)

Oil Study, 6 x 8 inches

Magnificent Universe

"Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, immense, indifferent Universe in which humans are relagated to obscurity. But I see the emergence in our consciousness of a Universe of a magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined. And if much of the Universe can be understood in terms of a few simple laws of Nature, those wishing to believe in God can certainly ascribe those beautiful laws to a Reason underpinning all of Nature. My own view is that it is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be.
Whether we will acquire the understanding and wisdom necessary to come to grips with the scientific revelations of the twentieth century will be the most profound challenge of the twenty-first."
-Carl Sagan

Oil, 18 x 24 inches