3 posts tagged with "Science"

There is, I have long maintained, a profound dignity in doing absolutely nothing. The olive tree outside my window understands this. It has not produced a single fruit since November, and I respect it enormously for that decision. But the olive tree is merely dormant. It has not, as far as I can tell, reduced its heart rate to four beats per minute, dropped its body temperature to near freezing, or gone several months without eating, drinking, or visiting the bathroom. For that level of commitment to inactivity, one must look to the hibernators.

I should say at the outset that predicting the weather has always been a fundamentally absurd enterprise. The atmosphere is a chaotic fluid system with more variables than any civilisation has ever been equipped to measure, and yet we have been trying to guess what it will do next for roughly four thousand years. The fact that we now occasionally succeed is less a testament to human genius than to human stubbornness, which may, in fact, be the same thing.

I have spent forty years watching the sun rise over the Aegean, and in that time I have learned precisely two things with absolute certainty. First: the sun does not care about your alarm clock. Second: neither does your body.