Give a Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Centre of the Universe

That’s not my title, it’s from a Fishbone album in the ’90s but it suits my post nicely.

A long, long time ago in the eighties, I was thinking about what I want to do with my life as far as a career is concerned. I have disparate interests which doesn’t help. I was good at a few of these things but nothing was a standout. One of the things I was good at was physics. One of the reasons I liked this discipline was that I figured the salaries were fairly good, what with a good number of physicists being employed by universities as professors.

But the thing is I really didn’t want to decide. You see I still like doing a little bit of many things. So I came up with a rationalization. I rationalized that everything follows the laws of physics and in some cases, like the sub category of astronomy, they try to take into account the entirety of existence.

And from physics we get almost all our tools, math is half developed by physicists and physicists have made outstanding contributions to chemistry and biology. It is rarer for someone from another discipline to make an important contribution to physics.

So basically I decided that physics was a central discipline. That’s why I went to university for it.

My first year Chemistry textbook had a different philosophy. It was called, Chemistry: the Central Science. I hadn’t thought of it before but chemistry courses were required for both physics and biology, the three of which make up the hard sciences.

Eventually I thought even further. Biology is necessary, ie. human beings, to create all knowledge and learning.

Psychology is about the minds that view all of existence.

From here I even got to the arts. Economics is necessary for humanity to divvy up the worth of all disciplines and thus is essential for any enterprise.

History and geography almost always seems to centre around the deeds and spots of the student, thus making them the centre of their own universe.

So, finally I get it. No matter what discipline you are enamoured with, chances are it can be shown to be the centre of the universe. Because after all it will be the centre of your own universe. If you made it to this vantage years ago, well carry on. I can be slow sometimes.