Adams gets into the element of technology. He talks about himself
in 3rd person and considers his education to continue throughout
his entire life, in contrast to those whose education never gets started.
If you have the opportunity, get an education, not just training.
The dynamo is a big wheel that produced and generated power. They
were very impressive for the time. Still are.
This one was a forty-foot dynamo, which was enormous. The dynamo had taken over where the church left off. He recognizes that the dynamo was not science undoing mythology, but it was science as mythology. People were beginning to put their faith in science the way they once put their faith in the church. They didn’t understand this technology, but believed in it anyway.
Adams refers to a mystery of the time -- Radium, which "denied its God" or rather "denied the truths of his Science." Isaac Newton's universe affirmed that matter could neither be created or destroyed, only changed. Yet radium loses mass. Where did it go? The man who solved the mystery has become the face of the 20th century, his equasion the icon of the 20th cen.
E=mc²
We know what Einstein's equasion looks like, perhaps even that it explains how matter can change into energy and so "disappear." But how many of us really understand it? Like Adams, we accept it on faith. It is like a religious belief.
Adams said you have to choose the myths you believe, whether it’s
the myth of the dynamo or the myth of the Virgin Mary.