A physicist's realistic yet dramatic description of life and death certainly 

would wake up any intelligent soul or at least did it to my sleepy soul.

Alan Paige Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur.^[1][2] He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently a Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was one of the first people at MIT to have a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities.^[3] In his thinking and writing, Lightman is known for exploring the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, especially the dialogue between science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.^[4][5]

He is the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams.^[3] Einstein's Dreams has been translated into more than 30 languages and adapted into dozens of independent theatrical and musical productions worldwide, most recently (2019) at the off Broadway Prospect Theater in New York.^[6] It is one of the most widely used "common books" on college campuses. Lightman's novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award.^[7] He is also the founder of Harpswell, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.^[8]

Lightman has received six honorary doctoral degrees.

Alan Lightman
Born	November 28, 1948 (age 72) Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University (A.B.) California Institute of Technology(Ph.D.)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics Creative writing
Institutions	Professor of the Practice of the Humanities, MIT Founder and Chairman of Harpswell
Doctoral advisor	Kip S. Thorne

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth 

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms 

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil 

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze 

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse 

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets 

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world 

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe 

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines 

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear 

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

“A Brave and Startling Truth” was published in a commemorative booklet in 1995 and was later included in Maya Angelou: The Complete Poetry (public library).

Angelou composed the poem for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995. In 1994, Carl Sagan delivered a beautiful speech at Cornell University, inspired by the Voyager’s landmark photograph of Earth seen for the very first time from the outer reaches of the Solar System — a now-iconic image the spacecraft took on Sagan’s spontaneous insistence before shutting off the cameras upon completion of the planned mission to photograph the outer planets. 

In describing what the Voyager captured in that grainy photograph of mostly empty space, Sagan limned Earth as a “pale blue dot.” That became the moniker of the photograph itself and the title of his bestselling book published later that year, in which he wrote that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” on this “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

This poetic phrase imprinted itself on the popular imagination and permeated culture in the months following the book’s publication — the months during which Angelou was composing her poem. Like all great poets, she was extremely precise and deliberate about her word choice. Mote is a rather peculiar word, particularly in this cosmic context, and I can’t help but think that by using the phrase “mote of matter” in the final stanzas, Angelou was paying tribute to Sagan and to the message of the Voyager — a message about our place in the cosmic order not as something separate from and superior to nature, but as a tiny pixel-part of it, imbued with equal parts humility and responsibility.

'A Brave and Startling Truth' Theme

There are two major themes in this poem: the journey and the destination. Maya Angelou talks about three different types of journeys that the human race is traveling on: the journey through the cosmos, the journey through history, and the journey toward a better future. In this journey through the cosmos, we are seemingly alone, living on a tiny rock, spinning through a vast, dark universe. Angelou states: 

'We, these people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns.' 

Not only are we on a journey through space, but we are also on a journey through history. Angelou wants us to think about our civilization, and how we have grown as humans. She speaks of all the wonders that we have built through time, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the pyramids of Giza, to remind us of our history and how the human race has evolved up to the present day. 

The third concept of the journey used in the poem is the journey toward a better future. We are traveling through time and space, but where are we going? The title of the poem hints that when we get there, we will learn something amazing: a brave and startling truth that will change us forever. 

This ties into the other theme of the poem: destination. Humanity is traveling on this little planet through time and space, towards a destination called 'the day of peacemaking.' On that day, we will be able to look back on history and see that we have always tried to make civilization greater. Humans have built great monuments and collected vast amounts of knowledge. However, the real point of all of this is to come to a day when the whole world declares peace and ends the fighting that keeps us from reaching our true potential. The pyramids, or the Hanging Gardens, or anything else that we create doesn't make us great, according to Angelou. We are the 'true wonder of this world,' if only we would realize it!

인류는 무한하게 큰것과 한없이 작은 것의 자연 법칙을 탐구 했다.

큰것은 우주의 섭리이고 작은 것은 모든 것의 기본 단위이다. 

작은 것들의 원리는 무서운 파괴력을 가지는 폭탄과 막대한 에너지 

를 생산해 주고 의학의 발달에 크게 기여 했다. 우주의 섭리와 작은 

것들의 비밀을 찾아낸 인간은 상상을 초월하는 소통의 도구를 사용하고 

있다. 인간이 찾아낸 자연의 비밀은 과연 인간에게 이롭기만 할 것인가? 

아니면 돌이킬 수 없는 자연의 파괴를 초래 할 것인지? 이것도 인간이 

탐구 할 자연의 비밀 일까? 수요일 105도, 목요일 111 금요일 110 란다.

6월에 이렇게 더워 본적이 없다.