Here be dragons

I'm going to talk today about dragons in garages.

In Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World, he opens with a passage about a dragon in his garage. Obviously, you're intrigued. He shows you his garage, but you see no dragon. Of course not, he replies, because the dragon is invisible. You try to touch the dragon, but that's no use, as Sagan says the dragon is incorporeal. You try to smell it, but no odour. This process continues so on and so forth, until you exhaust all your possible attempts to prove the existence of this dragon in some way. 

This leads on to a wonderful quote by Sagan: 

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?

Rightly, he concludes, there isn't. 

However, sometimes, there is a dragon in the garage. Newton had one such famous dragon: gravity. He could 'see' it; he could percieve its existence, and had to come up with a new mode of understanding (calculus) to prove it. 

Sometimes, some people's dragons are interesting purely for their imaginative quality. The New Yorker is running a review of a retrospective exhibition held in New York on the life and times of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was either a eccentric visionary or complete madman; "Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals)."

Fuller was a strange, fantastic figure, who invented the idea of using geodesic domes as houses and gave eight hour lectures on everything, from environmentalism to architecture. Quote:

"instead of finding a job, [BF] took to spending his days in the library, reading Gandhi and Leonardo."

We need more people like this. I'm not saying that it would be a good thing if everyone were like this, but we do need more dream sellers.

If nothing else, they make the world less boring.

I think that's what I want to be. Penny for a dream?

This post cribbed and crafted from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.