How about Marvin?

So I have had a Bucky Fuller quote in my signature for froever it seems. I have always been fascinated by him and his work, and now there are over 42 hours of his lectures available for free here: Everything I Know The Visionary Lectures of Buckminster Fuller

Here's the fist one from January 1975 (they are long...)



-M

I was an annoying student at school, I'm too curious about matters. Not just with science, but with anything.

But with science, I was probably annoying. A science teacher had said something like, "Time did have a beginning." But me (and I did not mean this facetiously) would ask, "But what was happening twenty minutes before time began. I could not get my head around the fact time might have had a beginning. Religious education teachers were also irked with my "Who made God?" questions. They were sincere questions based on a love of knowledge.

The hardest one was when a teacher mentioned a picosecond. A picosecond is a trillionth of a second. A picosecond is to a second what a second is to 30,000 years.

What?!!!

How can such a small measure of time exist? It takes, well, a second to count a second and say it out loud. How can a picosecond even be a 'thing'? My head cannot envision such a small unit of time. It seems impossible.

But we'll keep reading. I won't mention how much I annoyed a teacher asking why there was a North Pole and South Pole, but no East or West Poles...

True. I think *some* teachers thought it was facetiousness. But it wasn't. From a very young age, I was always curious about dinosaurs, the creation of the world, things like time, etc. I would have articulated it in a different way, but the interest was there.

It wasn't always easy. Religious studies might involve talk of a 6,000-year-old Earth, but science lessons mentioned millions of years. How to reconcile that, eh? If Adam and Eve was true, where did that leave cavemen, etc?

So, yes, I was definitely very curious. And I still am. If the universe has no end, well it's pretty to comprehend something going on forever. But if it has an end, then what lies beyond the "end"?

Some teachers had good answers, though. I think one, after I asked about "What was taking place 20 minutes before time allegedly began?" said something like, "You may as well ask who the bachelor is married to." I think he was trying to get me to think that while we think something has to have always been there, it needn't necessarily have. Later on in life, people would answer that question with something like, "There was no 'before' prior to the beginning of time." That sort of makes sense - or not. ;-)

Interesting. I'm not religious, but I know that different churches/organisations believe different things. I did actually work with an evangelical who told people he took "Genesis" literally; yet others don't. I remember an article - was it in TIME? - where Pope John Paul II (I think) endorsed the possibility of man evolving from ape. So I know there's a lot of leeway.

I will chat with religious people - and this issue has come up. I've also read articles, one was in the Washington Post. One guy wrote something about how we shouldn't take "days" literally in the first book of the Bible because the Sun and the Moon weren't even around until "Day Four".

So, based on your post, do you believe Adam and Eve were actual individuals? (Isn't Adam Hebrew for "man")? How far does it go as a metaphor?