With Apologies to Feynman

I'm sitting in this busy coffee shop, allowing my mind to ruminate as it will, on what it will. My cup of tea cools on the table in front of me, wisps of steam unfolding in waves as it drifts off into apparent nothingness. Every so often, the scent sneaks past, tickling my nose with the hint of fruity sweetness.

Someone recently expressed to me her bewilderment of how I could enjoy a world without the supernatural, bereft of the unknown and filled only with cold science. But right in front of me sits a design of beauty, a simple cup of tea in a reinforced paper cup. The atoms of the water, tiny things that I can't even see, are so excited, vibrating so much that the water itself is changing, becoming vapor in the air. It has become so buoyant that it will float away from the cup, joining with the air as it disappears from sight, and someday that tea may fall again to this earth in a raindrop. With how much it's been raining lately, it may even be here that it falls. There's something magnificent in that thought, in the randomly cyclical nature of things.

But the tea steams in such an uncertain way, drifting to and fro in waves as it evaporates. What forces in this building are giving it cause to drift off to my left, and then to my right? But there is beauty in this too, in a question that I cannot answer, not because I cannot answer but because I may be able to someday. The mystery is as glorious as the solution, and discovery is a reward all by itself. Why is it this music on my MP3 player, a track from The Sims, is so reminiscent of the 50's for me? Is the zeitgeist so strong that 60 years later, a style of music can instantly summon an image of an era past?

It was sunny just an hour ago. And since then, it's become cloudy, it rained in very lax manner, and then suddenly it began to snow intensely. The snow's since receded to become more of a rain and snow mixture, and not much of one at that. Knowing the science behind such odd turns of weather makes it no less wondrous to behold.

There is nothing cold about science- for every detail is intricately dynamic, describing interactions of mundane phenomena in a way that brings new perspective to common life. Indeed, it belies the idea that life is common at all.

Spiritual matters are fine for those who wish for it. Some folk are intrigued by the inexplicable, especially as they try to craft their own explanations for it. But by its very nature, the supernatural is beyond the limitations of my world, and as it stands, there's so much in this world left to discover, so little that I truly understand that I see no reason to try and superimpose further mysteries on it.

The inconceivable nature of nature is more than satisfactory for me.