Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

I’m not really sure what their point was. My world is (mostly) not enchanted (I am a Maritimer with Irish roots, after all, so the weird isn’t that far away), as I am a reductionist at heart.

Is my sense of wonder diminished by understanding Rayleigh Scattering?

Not only “no”, but I would say that it is doubled or more by being able to appreciate the blue of the sky and the reflected blue of the water while understanding the mechanisms...

just like how my appreciation of both optics and E&M deepened tremendously when I realized that the former was just a simple expression of the latter...

the same “latter” that led Einstein to the Lorentz transformation to solve the problems of additive velocities causing ridiculous magnetic fields, and thus gave us SR.

I mean, wow, just wow.

My world IS enchanted, but by math and its wondrous ilk.

I feel wonder and awe at the grand mathematical structure of the universe, and to me that's exactly what the point was. I hope the author would agree.

> Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.”

> One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

Disenchantment would be if knowing about Rayleigh scattering made rainbows less beautiful.

> Is my sense of wonder diminished by understanding Rayleigh Scattering?

Richard Feynman asked a similar question, IIRC about knowing how the color and smell of flowers is conveyed to your senses and processed by your brain. He said he had a friend who claimed that knowing the science behind such things diminished them, and Feynman said "I think he's kind of nutty."

A more radical definition that I have heard of, is about the disappearance of (the belief in) powerful but quite alien non-human beings. But then that's much older than the current atheism : something that monotheistic religions started a long time ago already with their "exclusivity".

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