quicksilver

I am reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I have recently become Stephenson fan, reading Snow Crash and The Diamond Age earlier this year. I don’t know how historically accurate the QuickSilver novel is, but it seems to get the feel of the time right (lots more info on this book can be found @ http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml). I like how Stephenson reflects and involves the religious views of the day, either past or future, into his novels. In Quicksilver, it is the rise of the Natural Philosopher contrasted with the Puritan and Anglican religious movements (at least up to page 209).

Here is an idea from the novel that I really like. The thinking is attributed to Isaac Newton and his ideas about light. “The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand or even hear… We interrupt that light and we are warmed and illuminated by it. By stopping the light, we destroy part of the message without understanding it.”

Of course, Newton figured out many of the messages in the light, but not without a lot of controversy. How many other glimpses of God are we warmed and illuminated by, but because we can only use our human senses and prejudices to interpret, we interrupt or skew the message without understanding it?

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