Have you ever tried reaching the end of a rainbow? I have, but it always dissappeared before I even got close. Somehow, I always imagined that if I could just walk fast enough, or maybe use a helicopter or something, I could reach it. However, I recently found out that it’s actually impossible to reach the end, because the very nature of the rainbow makes the ends move away from you as you get closer. When you think about it, that makes a nice metaphor of how some people keep chasing something that will never give them real satisfaction, and the closer they get to it, the less satisfied they seem.

Most people would consider the rainbow to be an optical illusion, and this made me think about how we actually look at things. We can see the rainbow, but we can’t touch it, and most people would say that there is nothing really there. Then again, how many senses do you need to use in order confirm that something is real? Couldn’t you say that the rainbow is just you seeing the water in a different way? In reality, all you see with your eyes is just reflected light, and the light reflected from water in a glass appears differently than the light from water in the ocean, and yet that water is not called an optical illusion. So what is really an illusion?

The rainbow is just an example of something that may apply to other areas of human knowledge as well. I think that sometimes we humans are so sure of what we know and how quickly technology and society develops that we don’t stop to think about the possibility that our senses and our reasoning may be inherently flawed. Personally I believe that there are things in the universe that we will never fully understand by ourselves, one of them being our own existence. Still, I am all for trying to figure out as much as we can, even though we have to accept that we see things in a way that may or may not be accurate, depending on how you want to define what’s real and true. I do believe that science and technology can sometimes make us more aware of the beauty of the universe that we live in. However, on other occasions, I prefer to just watch the rainbow instead of running after it.

P.S: For those who read my last post, I finally got hold of and read the book, it was great. Some intelligent person had decided to keep both the package and the note that informed of its arrival hidden in the post office, but luckily my employer knows the boss there and so we were able to figure it out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 11:45 pm and is filed under My life, Philosophical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.