{"id":6712,"date":"2015-08-09T01:26:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-09T08:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6712"},"modified":"2015-08-15T01:30:38","modified_gmt":"2015-08-15T08:30:38","slug":"oliver-sacks-heart-wrenching-goodbye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/08\/09\/oliver-sacks-heart-wrenching-goodbye\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Sacks’ Heart-wrenching Goodbye"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Oliver Sacks: My Periodic Table<\/h1>\n

By OLIVER SACKS<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Aidan Koch<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

I LOOK forward eagerly, almost greedily, to the weekly arrival of journals like Nature and Science, and turn at once to articles on the physical sciences \u2014 not, as perhaps I should, to articles on biology and medicine. It was the physical sciences that provided my first enchantment as a boy.<\/p>\n

In a recent issue of Nature, there was a thrilling article by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on a new way of calculating the slightly different masses of neutrons and protons. The new calculation confirms that neutrons are very slightly heavier than protons \u2014 the ratio of their masses being 939.56563 to 938.27231 \u2014 a trivial difference, one might think, but if it were otherwise the universe as we know it could never have developed. The ability to calculate this, Dr. Wilczek wrote, \u201cencourages us to predict a future in which nuclear physics reaches the level of precision and versatility that atomic physics has already achieved\u201d \u2014 a revolution that, alas, I will never see.<\/p>\n

Francis Crick was convinced that \u201cthe hard problem\u201d \u2014 understanding how the brain gives rise to consciousness \u2014 would be solved by 2030. \u201cYou will see it,\u201d he often said to my neuroscientist friend Ralph, \u201cand you may, too, Oliver, if you live to my age.\u201d Crick lived to his late 80s, working and thinking about consciousness till the last. Ralph died prematurely, at age 52, and now I am terminally ill, at the age of 82. I have to say that I am not too exercised by \u201cthe hard problem\u201d of consciousness \u2014 indeed, I do not see it as a problem at all; but I am sad that I will not see the new nuclear physics that Dr. Wilczek envisages, nor a thousand other breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky \u201cpowdered with stars\u201d (in Milton\u2019s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world\u2019s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens\u2019 beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience \u2014 and death.<\/p>\n

I told my friends Kate and Allen, \u201cI would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll wheel you outside,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The New York Times<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Oliver Sacks: My Periodic Table By OLIVER SACKS Aidan Koch I LOOK forward eagerly, almost greedily, to the weekly arrival of journals like Nature and Science, and turn at once to articles on the physical sciences \u2014 not, as perhaps I should, to articles on biology and medicine. It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}