"Rigorous reasoning is crucial in mathematics, and insight plays an important secondary role these days. In the natural sciences, I would say that the order of these two virtues is reversed. Rigor is, of course, very important. But the most important value is insight--insight into the workings of the world. It may be because there is another guarantor of correctness in the sciences, namely, the empirical evidence from observation and experiments."
"You're childish" my mom always remarks. "be more mature" she always adds.
I guess she is partly right. Part of me fails to grow up. It is my childish ego, the part of me that yearns to play with things. Like puppets on strings,all aspects of my nature are controlled by this playful nature,most profoundly my intellectual behavior.
Curiously,my playful intellectual behavior has lead to an obsession with understanding nature. Why? I ask myself.Why do I also adore physics?
It is because nature is like the toy car a kid plays with. Like the kid,I want to play with this toy car,called nature. But this toy car is unusual: it has no manual. The producers forgot to include it. Without a manual, I can't play with this car because I don't know how it works. Thus,I must learn the way it operates without the manual. I must try to invent my own manual. This act of recreating this manual is "physics" the study of nature. That's why l loved physics. Every time l learnt a new physics theory or principle, I was building the manual, thus, coming closer to fulfilling my desire to play with the enigmatic toy car. For example, if I knew the principles of magnetism, I could use it to play with the workings of nature like an engineer to invent a transformer! This excited me. But I ask you, reader, what attribute is most crucial to me or the kid in figuring out the way this toy car works? What tool is most important to the mind in coming up with the manual.
It is insight. Why? Because it is only through having this powerful mental faculty that an individual will have the ability to profoundly decipher the inner workings of the toy car without possessing the manual, which is the secret codes governing nature.
Thus,I concur with Prof. Jaganathan.
Insight is the tool required to re-create the missing manual, which is the study of physics.
Like puppets on strings, all aspects of my nature are controlled by this playful nature, m ost profoundly my intellectual behavior.---Don't forget to always leave a space after each punctuation mark!
That's why l loved physics.
Every time l learned a new physics theory or principle, I was building the manual, thus, coming closer to fulfilling my desire to play with the enigmatic toy car.
For example, if I knew the principles of magnetism, I could use it to play with the workings of nature like an engineer, to invent a transformer!
Great essay! I really like the way you used the toy car analogy to illustrate your point! Good luck with school and have fun!
:)
