One-Liner Wednesday on Illumination

“It can be illuminating to look at the world in different ways.”  

Frank Wilczek, theoretical physicist

This quote came to me from Bob in my senior center writers’ group. Bob kindly provided the excerpt below on complementarity:

COMPLEMENTARITY IS MIND- EXPANDING

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“Thus, complementarity is an invitation to consider different perspectives. Unfamiliar questions, unfamiliar facts, or unfamiliar attitudes, in the spirit of complementarity, give us opportunities to try out new points of view and to learn from what they reveal. They foster mind expansion.  Why not bring this spirit to supposed conflicts between art and science, or philosophy and science, or religion A and religion B, or religion and science?

It can be illuminating to look at the world in different ways.  In my own experience, early exposure to Catholicism inspired me to think cosmically and to look for hidden meanings beneath the appearance of things. The attitudes have proved enduring blessings, even after I abandoned the faith’s strict dogmas. Today, I often go back to Plato, to Saint Augustine, to David Hume, or to “outdated” scientific works- Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell-to converse with great minds, and to practice thinking differently.

Of course, trying to understand different ways of thinking does not necessarily mean you must agree with them, much less adopt them as your own. In the spirit of complementarity, we should maintain detachment. Ideologies or religions that claim an exclusive right to dictate uniquely “correct” views are contrary to the spirit of complementarity.  That said, science has a special status. It has earned enormous credibility, both as a body of understanding and as an approach to analyzing physical reality, through its impressive success in many applications. Scientists who define themselves narrowly fail to enrich their minds, but people who avoid science impoverish theirs.”

Frank Wilczek

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