1. Why did I choose this course?
I wanted to better appreciate the beauty in nature, to translate something purely visual and aesthetic at face-value to something deeper, perhaps more knowledge-based and more intellectual (?), through engaging myself in different disciplines. Nevertheless, I think that it’s still important for us to following our instincts and feel the “beauty” of something, sometimes intellectualizing or over-analysing it may just spoil everything!
2. What do I think will be the nature of this course?
I think this course will be multi-faceted, with the involvement of various different disciplines. I think it’ll provide us with a chance to explore things which we really want to know more about.
3. What is nature?
Nature is the world around us and aspects of it which just simply occur on their own. (not man-made)
4. Why should we be interested in nature?
We ourselves are part of nature! We are inextricably linked so it’s only logical that we attain some knowledge about the natural phenomena around us.
Food for thought:• How do we define nature?
• Must “nature” be “natural”?
• How sure are we about the nature of our planet?
• Actual presence v.s Photographs: Is first-hand experience and an all-rounded sensory perception really that important?
• Beauty as an ideology v.s. Beauty as a physical sensation
• What are our criteria for beauty? How do we measure them?
• 7 natural wonders of the world Who selects them? Do we believe in what the experts say or do we believe in ourselves?
• How do we reconcile our different concepts of “beauty”? Do we know if we are talking about the same concept of “beauty”?
• We are unique individuals is it possible to reach a consensus?
• Is beauty individualized or is there a common language?
SCALE:• Doppler’s law? Red shift, blue shift? Soundwaves/distance, amplitude, wavelength, changes in waveform
• Outdoor demonstration at the netball courts/tracks/J-block.
The Little Prince
(Source: http://lotsofthoughts.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/al_st_exupery07_le_petit_prince5.jpg)
My thoughts:• The scale of our universe, the sizes of the planets and bodies in relation to each other, the distances between them, and even the number of planetary bodies in our universe The scale is really too huge for us to completely understand and obtain a sense of it. The vastness of everything is overwhelming and it makes us question our tiny presence. :)
• Perhaps there is beauty in the inability to contemplate the unknown, or the known that is so great that it exceeds our being.
Quotes from ThinkExist.com :
“The size of the universe depresses many people, but not me, I'm delighted at it”
“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.” ~ Thomas Henry Huxley (English biologist, 1825-1895) (he was an advocate of Darwin’s natural selection theory and named the phylum Coelenterata (jellyfish))