Dinesh's photos with the keyword: 10/25/2021

The alternative to mystery isn’t trivality or boredom. Rainbows no less beautiful when we understand that they are produced by sunlight separated into spectral components, just as life is not rendered tedious when seen as structured by Nucleic acids rather than as ‘elan vitale’. Or when evolution is seen as the ultimate force behind that structuring. Or when human beings are seen as inextricably connected to the whole business. Rather, as Darwin famously wrote at the conclusion of ‘The Origin of Species, “There is grandeur in this view of life.” ~ Page 312

For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti (Ricardo) is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a particular point no coloured arch can appear. The rainbod is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole ans separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the “internalists” who account the majority of neuroscientists); consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of the world process. ` Page 35 Leonardo found himself stymied by a related question: What causes a rainbow? That would have to wait for Newton, who showed how white light can be scattered by a water mist into its component colors based on wavelengths. Nor did Leonardo figure out that light of shorter wavelengths, at the blue end of the spectrum, scatters more than light of longer wavelengths; that would have to wait for Lord Reyleigh in the late nineteenth century and then for Einstein to calculate the exact formula for the scattering. ~ Page 443 - Excerpt: “Leonardo De Vinci” Author Walter Isaacson