Bible Amendment No. 1

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. - Genesis 1 verse 3, King James Bible.

“To see a world in a grain of sand” – William Blake

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And God said, Let there be light: and there was light, and glass!

You might think this humble material, in its crude form, that lines our ocean beaches and trails your personal carbon footprints on your romantic outing with your significant other on a moonlit night does not warrant your second glance. Look again, this crude form of glass in the form of silica, i.e. sand, as numerous as the stars up in the firmament above, has dramatically changed the course of human history as well as our existence.

Take for examples:

It brightens and enhances our physical world with window, light bulb, eye glasses, and movie.

It sheds light on our inner souls and captures instances of them with mirror, camera lens and television.

But more importantly, it ignites in us our inner light, in the form of information and knowledge, to see with our mind-eyes glimpses of the very mind of God, through telescope, microscope, test tube (the generic for all other glass-integrated scientific instruments) and fiber optic.

The last one, those tiny strands of glass fiber, forms the backbone and the central nervous system of our communication network and empowers the Internet. This allows our insatiable information spiders, our cell phones and computers, to crawl and feed on the World Wide Web, through information gathering and sharing, in a never-ending quest, to comprehend our world, and on a subconscious level, a better insight, to understand others as well as ourselves.

This knowledge quest and curiosity hunger prod us to take our tentative baby steps out of our comfort zone and extend further our intellectual reach, out there to touch other worlds in the Cosmos. But only to find that our earth is but a mere insignificant speck of sand, on the vast shore of a remote, lonely island called the Milky Way, awashed in an immense, unfathomable space ocean. But it is our world, our only home, often taken for granted, neglected and exploited towards disrepair.

And ultimately, the Holy Grail we have all been seeking since the day we first became aware of our "self", to find out our purpose in life or our roles in this world, and to the greater extent, to make sense of the Consciousness that governs and drives this universe and maybe other universes beyond, God himself.

And all because of a little tiny grain of sand . . .

If you are in an inquiring mood, go and watch Steven Johnson's interesting PBS series, "How We Get to Now", it has an episode on Glass.


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