:-O

Maybe the universe wants to be known. The way a babe knows it's mother.

Charles,
Another cool photo courtesy of NASA. Wow, the universe is gorgeous.

"The brain was not made to open the secrets of the universe."

Unwarranted assumption that the brain was "made." While humans may not be able to understand everything that is out there, there is no reason to believe that are not "meant" (whatever that is supposed to mean) to make such an effort.

From "The essence of the universe... has no barrier to defend itself against the courage to know it," you conclude that it's not "meant" (as TechBear said, whatever that means) to be understood? Just how drunk are you this morning, Charles?

I'm going to go with Rilke on this one, not EOWilson.

So that quote is actually from 1818, from his inaugural address to the University of Berlin. That translation is poetic but rather truncated. The original reads:

Das verschlossene Wesen des Universums hat keine Kraft in sich, welche dem Mute des Erkennens Widerstand leisten könnte; es muss sich vor ihm auftun und seinen Reichtum une seine Tiefen ihm vor Augen legen und zum Genusse bringen.

Another way (among hundreds of possibilities) of translating might be this:

The taciturn essence of the universe has no power per se that might offer resistance to the courage of knowing; it must start talking, laying open its richness and depths for enjoyment.

It may well be true that our brains are *inadequate* for understanding the universe. Especially the quantum universe, I would think. That's not the same as "the universe was not made to be examined" or that we shouldn't at least TRY to know things. If you're advocating willful ignorance, for some reason (and what on earth would that reason be?), I'd be pretty upset with you, but I can't really tell if that's what you're trying to convey. You know your conclusion sounds sort of like the opposite of that Hegel quote, right?

"Some now suspect that there might be more planets than stars in the universe."

Really? People used to think there were a whole lot of stars that, unlike our sun, did not have planets orbiting them? I don't believe that.

It's just that we're getting better at detecting planets orbiting around other stars, isn't it?