Address Unknown

What, I wonder, is the story is behind the young man I saw yesterday on the train holding a single plastic coat hanger? 

What about the blind busker singing Motown songs in an adenoidal baritone, but tapping his cane to a beat different from the song. 


But my real point here is the recent announcement of the discovery of gravity waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background, truly a great feat for science and mankind. Brilliant ideas, strong arguments and careful observations over the course of years have given us an almost inconceivable access deep into the past to the very beginning of time.  Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, whose blog  preposterousuniverse.com has the motto In truth, only atoms and the void, hails this as a triumph of human intelligence and hard work...and I think he is right: these results are downright mind-boggling. 

He writes "Science is a dialogue between the free play of ideas-theorizing-and the harsh constraints of empiricism, " and, in his interview on PBS New Hour, that curiosity as motivation and the making and testing of predictions as the discipline, is at the core of what makes science science. 

What I wonder, however, is whether curiosity disciplined by empirically tested hypotheses is the only justifiable way to address the universe. Are we addressed at all? Carroll quotes Carl Sagan on man as the universe's way of knowing itself. Is this two way or one way? 

It seems to me that a fundamental and persistent behavior of all human beings is to address and be addressed. I'm an adult; I know that wanting something to be so doesn't make it so. Exploration addresses the universe. What about hospitality which addresses the visitor, and friendship the friend? If these are legitimate ways to address each other and all things on earth, might they not also be legitimate with regard to the universe?  

I'm going to keep asking the question. God-in-love is what I've come to so far.  I do know that knowing is not the only end of man; there's also doing. Hurrah for generosity, constancy and courage in science and everything.