Everything... and Nothing

I heartily recommend this excellent two-part documentary series from the BBC about the universe, our attempts over the centuries to understand it, and our place in it.

Presented by Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, the two films, epic in scope and often wonderfully surreal in style, take the viewer on a profound exploration of the true size and shape of the universe, and delve into the amazing science behind apparent nothingness.

Top notch filmmaking - a tone poem about both the wonders and the never-ending mysteries of existence.

Paul Kimball

"Dr." John Cleese on the "All-Knowingness" of Man

Sometimes, brilliant philosophers come in the most unexpected packages.

We should always be conscious of the fact that there are a great many things about our universe, and ourselves, that we haven’t even begun to understand yet.  This is the fundamental flaw in the thinking of atheists, who maintain that they "know" there isn't a God, a proposition that is as unsupportable as that of the true believers, who claim to "know" that there is a God. To close ourselves off to the possibility that there might be more to heaven and earth than our current science can explain would be foolish, and unscientific.

I think that deep down, we're all agnostics. As death approaches, I think the true believer will always have doubt, and I think the hard-core atheist will always have hope - and neither of them will be entirely certain, for different reasons, of their "knowledge".

Paul Kimball