Mark Anthony Esperida

A Sense of Wonder

You wonder. How is it possible? Possible to put billions and billions of transistors into a slice of silicon thinner than a candy wrapper and smaller than a ten-centavo coin, possible to have babies even if they cannot? You wonder how the silicon can perform trillions of calculation per second. Your mind wanders into the factory as you try to imagine the machines and gadgets that made this possible.
Well, because people share your sense of wonder, microchips of this magnitude and power are reality today.
You wonder. Is color real? Is the blue I see the same blue that all the people in the world sees? Is the red that I see on roses the same red that my friend sees? Do colors tell me something around me? You wonder about the rainbow and how the light of the sun dances on the waters of the seas during an exceptionally clear day.
Well, because others that came before you have wondered as much, the science of spectroscopy was born. Now the studies of the heavenly bodies become more precise or more informative and the healing of human bodies made easier.
You wonder. Is there anything other than gas, solid, liquid, plasma and the newest substance, the BEC or the Bose-Einstein Condensate exists in the universe? Now you know that plasma is the fourth state of matter and that it is the state of most matter and in interstellar space. The BEC or the Bose-Einstein Condensate predicted by Albert Einstein and Sthyendra Nath Bose.
Finally you wonder, like so many great minds have before you, whether the atom is really basic building block for the so-called matter. This sense of wonder has led the scientists to build complex or complicated and expensive machines to dissect the very essence of matter. That is how the4y discovered these substance quarks.
Children are often called irritating because they ask a lot of questions. They want to know so many things about this place we live in- the environmental interactions, the space-which include the stars, planets and other heavenly bodies. They do want to know so many things about the world around them. Even they are just children, they have this curiosity. “Why?” is often heard springing out there mouths. A discovery is often punctuated with or by gleeful exclamations and reactions of “That's it.”
The sad thing is that many of us lose this sense of wonder as we grew up, having age. We take for granted or we simply lose the will to wonder. A lucky few number of people, however, never lose this and keep it well into their age. Wondering and thinking are pleasurable daily activities that make them happy and alive.
A sense of wonder is worth keeping and enriching. It’s a treasure that can never be taken away from us. It is a bright flame that will throw a ray of light on dark paths and alleys. With this healthy sense of wonder, we will never ever lose our way.

posted by markanthony @ 11:49 AM