Gulliver's travels

STRANGE EXPERIMENTS IN LAPUTA

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·     There is a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers

·        A scientist tries to turn excrement back into food

·        Another is attempting to turn ice into gunpowder and is writing a treatise about the malleability of fire, 

·        An architect is designing a way to build houses from the roof down

·        A blind master is teaching his blind apprentices to mix colors for painters according to smell and touch.

·        A doctor in another room tries to cure patients by blowing air through them. 

·        One professor has a class full of boys working from a machine that produces random sets of words. Using this machine, the teacher claims, anyone can write a book on philosophy or politics. 

·        A linguist in another room is attempting to remove all the elements of language except nouns. 

·        Another professor tries to teach mathematics by having his students eat wafers that have mathematical proofs written on them.

·        Another claims that conspiracies against the government could be discovered by studying the excrement of subjects.

The academy of LAGADO serves to create entirely useless projects while the people starve outside its walls. 

The result is a society in which science is promoted for no real reason and time is wasted as a matter of course.

SYMBOLS

The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s wildly excessive pride in its own puny (weak) existence.

The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal, and physical side of humans when examined up close and in great detail.

The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life and no use in the actual world. 

The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational existence, a life governed by sense and moderation of which philosophers since Plato have long dreamed. They have no names in the narrative nor any need for names, since they are virtually interchangeable, with little individual identity

ENGLAND all the races Gulliver encounters could be versions of the English and that his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly