A couple of weeks ago, my ten-year-old daughter asked me a question that put me in a weird state of mind. She asked, innocently enough, “Was there anything you really wanted when you were a kid?”
“Yes”, I said. The answer came quickly, and I said the first thing that came to my mind. “ A Cray XMP supercomputer.” Yes, I was a weird kid. (I also wanted my own scanning electron microscope, among other things…)
Since the beginning of time, humans have created stories about the way the world around them works. If they couldn’t figure it out on their own by observation and experimentation – the best time to grow food is planting in the Spring and harvesting in the fall – they created a story about why things seem to work the way it does – why does the weather get cold for 6 months out of the year? Hades, Demeter and the pomegranate.