Hunting The Boojum

The Madman with the Lantern

Of course priests at the time were deaf to the fearful cries of Nietzsche’s madman running through the streets with a lantern crying out “God is Dead!” Now, a hundred years later, the madman is running through the streets with an even more fearful cry, “Nature is Dead!” As expected in their secure and respected jobs, government and business employed scientists are deaf to his new cries. But more and more independent thinkers are realising the mind-blowing implications of relativity theory in all fields and the end of the insane belief that scientific observers are immaterial spirits who can stand outside the universe to measure it.

The Hunting of the Quark

I began to realise that my deep responsiveness to “The Hunting of the Snark” was due to the way the narrative paralleled events in the world of materialistic science. The reductionist scientists who had been assiduously hunting the irreducible atom had “stood erect and sublime for a moment of time” when they thought they had finally found the ultimate “building blocks” of matter that made up and controlled the universe. Then they discovered that the atom was not solid but was made up of even smaller “atoms” like quarks, and so ad infinitum… and these did not behave like building blocks at all. They and their hopes were confounded, sucked down into the horror vacui of the “uncaused first cause”, the Big Bang. In the words of Lewis Carroll that concludes his poem, yet were the first words that came into his head in 1874, “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see!”