@LostInParadise
“But it is also worth asking if science has ruined our way of looking at the world.”
I would beg to differ. It has repaired our way of looking at the world. At last.
We should never have indulged in exalting mystery. There is no virtue in not knowing something. To revere mystery is only to revere one’s own ignorance.
If unraveling the mystery of the rainbow made it lose its magnificence to Keats, for putting it in the category of “ordinary” things as opposed to the category of inexplicable magic, then there was something very wrong with the way Keats looked at the world.
The “magic” category is an empty set. It always was an empty set. There is an answer to every question. Our not knowing the answer does not make the question an inherently different kind of question from the ones already answered. If an explained rainbow is in the category of “common things” now, then everything in the cosmos rightfully belongs to the category of “common things”.
If Keats could only find poetry in things he did not understand, then he literally made a living off his ignorance. And excuse the ad hominem, but that’s not the sort of man I would want to be.
I also think he’s wrong. Science has not made the world one bit more boring. On the contrary.
Science has expanded our imagination by light-years, literally. Before science, no one could have imagined portals, thinking machines, computer-generated pseudo-realities, planetary invasions, people exploring outer space, moon- or planet-sized buildings, solar-system-sized engineering projects, plagues of microscopic robots that devour everything…
Science only makes angels, haunts, gnomes and lamias seem bland by comparison.