Reflections on the Nature of Nature and Where We Fit In

When I was twelve, a small group of boys whose families spent summers in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, because their parents had ties to the laboratories there, used to hang out in what was in those days the coolest place in town, the MBL (Marine Biological Laboratories) Club; that is, when we weren’t tooling around on our bikes or at the beach or going home for lunch. In between Ping-Pong games and the like, in rooms decorated with colored glass globes, starfish, and big crab shells hanging suspended beneath the ceiling in fishing nets, in cozy alcoves lined with musty books and built-in cushioned love seats and chess sets scattered about, I remember long conversations about big topics. Jaskin’s Drug Store stocked a whole rotating rack of Mentor paperbacks for fifty cents each, with titles such as One, Two, Three . . . Infinity and The Birth and Death of the Sun by George Gamow, and Frontiers of Astronomy by Fred Hoyle. We bought them up and read them voraciously and were enthralled. We would sit around drinking Cokes from green bottles we got from the big red machine in the basement of the MBL, where you had to pull the large handle around to the right after putting in your nickel to make the bottle drop down, reading out loud to each other and debating the big bang and the steady state theories, the nature of the universe and consciousness, and what it all meant for our lives. I still have my copy of One, Two, Three . . . Infinity. It has that old paperback smell, its pages yellowed and brittle, its spine broken. …