Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Lucretius ficcione

Based on a number of observations, the seminal one being that not even death stops the college football machine—
.....such tumblings are a sign
That motions also of the primal stuff
Secret and viewless lurk beneath—
Titus Lucretius Carus proposed in his 200-page poem De rerum natura a number of radical & anachronistic concepts.

Unfortunately for TLC, Aristotle was still The Man, would remain so for 1500 more years, & only Virgil—felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas—had a few good words to say.

Fortunately for us, Lucretius also understood the grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors & wrote great Latin.

The poem survived; & with it kinetics, gravity & the first determinations of indeterministic quantum physics.

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