A Purpose for Searching

 I read today a book review of Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, a finalist in this year's National Book Award for Translated Works.  The 'work of fiction based on real events'  concerns physicists reckoning with various periods of science history, including the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity.  There is the chemist Fritz Haber, who invents the reaction that produces nitrogen fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen, a process used to enable modern agriculture and is estimated to have enabled over 3 billion human lives (and billions more chickens, pigs, and cattle).  His nightmare is that his talent was perverted to also invent the process for producing chlorine gas that was used in gas warfare in WWI and in the Nazi concentration camps.  Karl Schwarszchild solved the field equations from Einstein's General Relativity theory and realized the horror of Black Holes.  

This concept of nightmares from understanding made me think about humanity's drive for understanding as a fundamental feature of cognition (Duh!).  Is there any difference for my brother's search for truth in the Bible and my interest in understanding from logic and science?  I recall with great fondness the feeling I had in graduate school when we used statistical mechanics to derive Boltzmann's gas constant.  I had a sense that perhaps all of existence was comprehensible, was discernible.  The fear of meaninglessness was quenched temporarily.  A part of my psyche says, 'Don't worry!  The answers are out there, and though things seem chaotic and meaningless, it is only your ignorance and lack of data that gives you the impression that all is a mystery.'  A feeling of bliss ensues.

The alternative part of my psyche says, 'Whatever sensation you have of understanding, life leads to death and the abyss.  There is no purpose or meaning.'  Depression ensues.  

Despite the evidence, there must be more, there must be some meaning, even if it is meaning of my own invention.  All is not lost, even in nihilism.  I have the capacity to know love and joy, whether the universe is ordered or unintelligible.  Awareness or ignorance of self delusion does not alter the sensation.