PROFUNDITY. Ideally, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, science is skepticism married to wonder. Note that wonder comes first: it is probably the first emotion we experience after birth! It is certainly the emotion that Wonderfest strives to nourish beyond childhood. With humility, science asks some of the deepest questions. And it often provides wondrous, natural, even mechanistic answers that make mysticism and the supernatural seem banal. Our species yearns for transcendence, and, strangely, science delivers. Not in the afterlife, but in THIS life — as it helps us to transcend personal egocentricism, conceptual anthropocentrism, and cosmic geocentrism. Sometimes, at its best, science also fills us with awe — with deep acknowledgment of the mysterious rather than the mystical.
"All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike," said Einstein, "and yet it is the most precious thing we have."
