I just finished reading the new book Star Bound by Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless III (shoutout to my friend Paige Kaufman who released a podcast interview with the authors yesterday – Space Spiels, wherever you get your podcasts). In the book, the authors discuss – among other things – how we have successfully grown plants in lunar regolith brought back from the Apollo missions. This is especially relevant now, as Artemis is aimed at establishing a permanent base on the surface of the Moon.
Contrary to what our pseudonym suggests, we are but college students. Thus we spent all of this past fall hoping and praying for a single miracle: Caltech’s Three Week Winter Break. This break is a time of rest, a time of relaxation, and a time of rejuvenation. During these three weeks, we slowly gather back up the energy needed for the upcoming winter term, whether that be through spending time with friends and family, going out and having fun, or simply just doing nothing. For this reason, we wanted to share with you how our respective winter breaks went.
I promised you Plato, and here we are. I would say that, after a period of rest where we fantasized about the future and especially about what we should and could have done during the following term, the philosopher I am going to write about fits perfectly. A Mediterranean illumination that I had trying to understand how to find a connection, but it allows us to see the world of Platonic ideas as a parallel reality truly capable of transforming the simple idea of thought, with the intellectual search for being. Mamma mia! What big words—well, let’s delve into the connections that can be seen between the world of science and research with Plato.
Well yes, I am more than sure that all of you have already heard of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the masters of ancient classical philosophy. There would not have been a beginning without them and none of the greatest philosophers, even of the contemporary age, would have managed to develop a single concrete idea, think of Immanuel Kant who still criticized Plato during the period of the Enlightenment (1750).
