Ada: la Scienza e la Religione "al Computer"

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/10/ada-lovelace-science-religion-letter/" :

Happy Birthday, Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer on Science and Religion

by Maria Popova
 

“Everything is naturally related and interconnected.”

Science and religion have long been pitted as diametric opposites, and yet some of humanity’s greatest minds have found in science itself a rich source of spirituality — there’s Albert Einstein’s meditation on whether scientists pray, Richard Feynman’s ode to the universe, Carl Sagan on the reverence of science, Bucky Fuller’s scientific rendition of The Lord’s Prayer, Richard Dawkins on the magic of reality, and Isaac Asimov on science and spirituality. But one of history’s most poignant meditations on the subject comes from the English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), better-known as Ada Lovelace — the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer.

Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Lisa Congdon for our Reconstructionists project. Click image for details.

In a 1844 letter to her Somerset neighbor, the experimenter in electricity Andrew Crosse, found in Betty A. Toole’s altogether fantastic Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (public library), Lovelace — the child of an era still characterized by extreme, all-permeating religiosity that governed nearly all aspects of public and private life — considers the spiritual quality of science, inseparable from the teaching of (at that time, religious) philosophy.

I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God’s natural works… And when I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tendency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — if not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole… There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe.
Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write on this subject…

Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers is an altogether illuminating read, shedding light on the life and mind of one of history’s most deserving yet unsung pioneers of the technologies that shape our lives today.