Consider Keeping Small Things in Perspective

by Roberto
 

Pebbles on the shore at Møns Klint, Denmark. Image Roberto Kolter.

Our previous post was a bit unusual for STC, the tran­s­crip­tion of a talk I had given a few weeks ear­lier. First and fore­most, I want to ex­press my grat­itude to Christoph who prop­osed the idea for that post. Let me also elab­or­ate on the end­ing of that pres­enta­tion, where I build the meta­phor of beaut­iful drops of dew hang­ing on leaves, drops that ev­en­tually reach the ocean, to sym­bolize the rela­tion­ship of our indiv­idual con­trib­utions to the tot­ality of micro­biology (or sci­ence, for that mat­ter). The idea, of course, is to re­mind us to keep our work in pers­pec­tive. Fascin­ating and impor­tant as we might think it is, our indiv­idual work is but a minute part of the whole of know­ledge. This is by no means my ori­ginal idea; it is a thought ins­pired by the words of Isaac Newton. Many decades ago, I was struck by these lines, which he wrote to des­cribe his life's work:

I do not know what I may ap­pear to the world, but to my­self I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the sea-shore, and divert­ing my­self in now and then find­ing a smooth­er pebble or a prettier shell than ordin­ary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all un­discov­ered before me.

That from the guy who, among many other things, for­mul­ated the laws of mo­tion and uni­ver­sal gravit­ation, helped dev­elop cal­culus, and dev­eloped a theory of color. His words are cer­tain­ly worth con­sider­ing at all times, whether we're feel­ing down after a failed experi­ment or ec­static upon the pub­lica­tion of a paper.