As April shades into May, my heroes spring into action once again. Not baseball players or even high-energy physicists, but sea turtle spotters all along the Atlantic and Gulf coast. It’s time again for sea turtles to leave their watery home and build their nests on the beach.
I’ve no idea really why sea turtles hold such a fascination for me. But I know that when I grow up (assuming that ever happens), I want to be a sea turtle watcher.
Even though I’m hundreds of miles away from the nearest nest, I can still be a virtual turtle watcher from my laptop. Below are just a few of the websites that will track what could be the biggest sea turtle nesting season in years (more on that below).
Check out this last link in particular. After a steep decline in Florida loggerhead nests beginning around 2000, loggerheads have made a remarkable comeback. 2012 was just about at the level seen before the collapse, so perhaps the turtles have returned! Notice also that the turnaround started around 2008, the year that The Turtle and the Universe was published. Coincidence? Maybe . . .
If anyone knows of other sea turtle nest tracking websites, I’d love to know about them. In the meantime, happy turtle watching!
Note: This is a blog entry I did for COSI. I’m fond of it, so I’m reproducing it here.
It seems like just yesterday. In 1980, astronomer Carl Sagan presented Cosmos, his PBS series about the joy and beauty of scientific discovery. More than anything else (yes, I have to admit, even more than my childhood visits to COSI), Cosmos awakened in me a love and a passion for science that has never dimmed.
In one of my favorite scenes, Sagan visits his old sixth grade classroom in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Sagan talks to the students there (who, coincidentally, were just my age at the time) about what a special time this was, the first time that humans had begun to explore the universe. In particular, Sagan talks about the beginning of our search for planets beyond the solar system.
When Cosmos aired, no one knew if even a single planet existed outside our Sun’s little family. Could we be the only planetary system in the galaxy, or even the universe? Or were planets common, with many other stars sporting their own planetary systems? Might any other planets even support life? No one knew.
But Sagan knew that scientists would one day find out. He said to those students – and to me, “By the time you are as old as I am now (Sagan was 45 at the time – coincidentally, just my age today), we should know for all the nearest stars whether they have planets . . . That will happen in your lifetime, and it will be the first time in the history of the world that anybody found out, really, if there are planets around other stars.”
Carl Sagan died in 1996, a time when we were just uncovering the first tantalizing hints of extra-solar planets. But Sagan’s prediction was right on the money. Today, we know of hundreds of other planets. Most of them (because they’re the easiest to find) are gas giants like Jupiter and larger, with no solid surface. And most of these are in tight orbits around their star, with soaring temperatures and little if any chance for our kind of life.
But this week NASA announced the discovery of three planets nearly the size of Earth, in orbits nearly like our planet’s orbit. It’s the closest we’ve come yet to finding another Earth in the heavens.
How did we find these worlds?
… the ways by which men arrive at knowledge of the celestial things are hardly less wonderful than the nature of these things themselves
— Johannes Kepler
OK, if you can get past the sexism in the quote above, you’ll recognize one of the great truths about science, a truth that Sagan celebrated again and again in Cosmos. Yes, what we discover is wonderful, but at least as wonderful are the methods by which we tiny humans, armed with nothing but cleverness, imagination, and the tools we create, learn about our world.
The Kepler telescope (named after the same Johannes Kepler quoted above) is one of those amazing human-created tools. In orbit around the Earth, Kepler stares at one particular patch of sky without pause. Hold your hand out at arm’s length. This is just about the size of the sky Kepler is watching. Within that patch, Kepler keeps track of the light from 100,000 stars, all at the same time.
When one of those stars gets dimmer, by even a fraction of a percent, Kepler records the event. The dimming might be caused by a spot on the star or some other local phenomenon. Or it might be caused by a planet passing between Kepler and the star. If, sometime later, Kepler sees the same kind of dimming again, the odds that Kepler has found a planet grow greater. After three or even four such cycles, Kepler’s scientists know they’ve spotted a planet.
This kind of science requires incredible patience. If a planet is in an Earth-like orbit, it will take around one Earth year to go around its star, so we’ll see the dimming of its star only once every few hundred days. Kepler needs to remember each dimming event and then, a hundred days, or two hundred, or five hundred days later, catch that same event again, all the while watching and recording 100,000 other stars in the same way. It’s a task a human could never accomplish alone. But with our amazing ability to mold and shape the raw materials of the world into useful tools, we can make visible that which had remained hidden since the cosmos was born.
These planets are for you, Carl. I wish you could’ve been around to see them.
The Hubble Space Telescope is in many ways one of humanity’s supreme achievements.
I remember as a child reading about the wonders that will open for us when we are able to put a telescope in orbit. The Hubble has certainly lived up to this billing. Among other accomplishments, it was part of the network of telescopes that helped scientists discover dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe, probably the most exciting cosmological discovery in my lifetime.
I was recently building a paper model of the Hubble (Yes, I do that sort of thing. Hot, huh?) when I came across an interesting piece of equipment attached to the telescope. It’s called a “magnetic torquer” and it helps the Hubble to move about in an ingenious way.
Consider the problem: you’ve got a telescope in orbit around the Earth. You can’t very well leave the telescope pointed in a single direction all the time. It needs to scan the entire sky. You also can’t move it around with any sort of propellant, as some of the fuel would inevitably end up on the telescope’s mirrors or other sensitive equipment. So how do you move?
Electric motors can make the telescope move one direction, as long as a counterbalance moves the other direction at the same time. But eventually you’ll want to cancel some of that extra motion. It certainly would be nice to have something to push against, something with which to exchange some of that excess momentum.
But there is something: the Earth itself! No, the Hubble can’t reach the surface of the Earth, or even the atmosphere. But it can reach something: the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns out that the magnetic torquers on the Hubble allow it to create a magnetic field that reacts with the weak but steady (at least on short time frames) magnetic field of the Earth. Engineers on Earth send a carefully controlled electric current into one or more of the three torquers to create the desired magnetic field. This field pushes on the Earth’s magnetic field, exchanging some momentum with the Earth, and moving the Hubble in just the desired manner. Amazing!
I am constantly in awe not just of the universe around us, but of humankind’s ability to use ingenuity and creativity to discover the deepest secrets. Go Hubble!
Scientific discovery is inherently creative. It’s a bit hard to see it that way sometimes, because the creation is slower than we might like. It’s slower, for instance, than the creation inherent in new movies, a new baseball season, or some new trend on Twitter (OK, I know nothing of Twitter, but I think they have trends, right?)
Today is one of those glorious days when the creativity of science becomes apparent. Today the Planck telescope released the best picture of our universe’s earliest visible moment that (as far as we know right now) we’ll ever have. Here it is:
So what’s the big deal?
Here’s the big deal.
Stars don’t come with labels. When we look up into the sky, we see lots of little points of light. Some might be brighter or dimmer, and a few even have visibly different colors. But they don’t tell us what they are. One of the amazing accomplishments of humanity is that we can look up at the stars and know that they aren’t little lights in the sky. They are suns, seen from very, very far away.
How far away? By a handful of connected methods, we’ve learned how to measure the distance to the stars. The first of those methods starts like this:
Hold your finger up in front of your nose. Look at it with your left eye. Notice what part of the far wall your finger blocks. Now close that eye and open the other. Your finger blocks out another part of the wall. With a little bit of trigonometry, you can find out how much closer your finger is than the back wall.
Stars are a lot further away than your finger, but that same idea helped us discover the distance to some of the nearest stars. More distant stars required other methods, including one discovered by an astronomer named Henrietta Swan Leavitt.
Leavitt began her astronomy career as a computer, hired to perform boring mathematical calculations in the days before such calculations were automated. Leavitt stuck with it, and became a trusted member of the Harvard College Observatory. Well, trusted may be a bit of an overstatement. As a woman, Leavitt was never allowed to use the observatory telescope. But she was given access to photographic plates, from Harvard and elsewhere. Leavitt noticed something strange on these plates. Most stars looked exactly the same on the plates, night after night after night. But other stars changed their brightness over a period of days or weeks. That wasn’t the exciting discovery. Variable stars had been known for a long time.
The exciting part was this: Leavitt noticed that the variable stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a cluster of stars visible only from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, had an interesting relationship. The brighter the star, the longer its period of bright and dark. In fact, the relationship was so strong that Leavitt could turn the data into a straight line graph.
Why was that so exciting? The Large Magellanic Cloud was suspected to be very, very far from Earth. Suppose you live in Baltimore and have two friends living in Seattle. Those two friends are just about the same distance from you, even if they live a few miles apart. The same is true of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud as seen from Earth. They are all so far away that any difference in their distances from us are unimportant. To a good approximation, these stars are all the same distance from us.
That means that the bright stars really are bright, the dim stars really dim. This relationship (with a few details omitted) let us humans find the distance not just to stars but to to galaxies containing those stars.
Where are we in our tale? We’ve got not just stars, but galaxies, collections of perhaps 100 billion stars or more, whose distances we can know through nothing but our ability to build instruments, make observations, and formulate and then test bold ideas about what’s out there.
Time for another down-to-earth phenomenon with cosmic significance. Watch a NASCAR race on television. As the 200 mph billboards fly past, you’ll hear a distinctive sound. The sound starts high, then suddenly switches to a lower pitch as the car goes past you. This is the Doppler effect, the result of sound waves bunched up in front of the approaching car, stretched out by the receding speeder.
An analogous effect occurs with light. Instead of pitch, the change is in color. As objects move away from us, the light they emit is shifted toward red. As they move toward us, light is shifted toward blue. In 1929, Edwin Hubble (and as it turns out two years earlier Georges Lemaître) discovered an odd relationship. Almost every observable galaxy wasredshifted; the were almost all rushing away from us. Not only that, but the further away the galaxy, the faster it was receding.
It was soon realized that this could be explained not by postulating our galaxy as the center of the universe, but instead by seeing that the view would be just the same from any galaxy if space itself were expanding. In that case, sort of a raisin bread view of the universe, all the galaxies would be raisins and space would be the expanding bread. From any raisin, it looks as if all the other raisins are running away.
Further, if we run the tape backward, we see that the universe as not expanding into the future, but contracting into the past. There must have been, in this scenario, a time when the universe was incredibly small, incredibly dense, and incredibly hot.
George Gamow and many others realized that such a small, dense, hot universe would have left behind a fossil. In 1965 two scientists named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered this fossil. It was an invisible kind of light, so stretched out over time and space that it was now in the microwave region of the spectrum. (Penzias and Wilson at first mistook this radiation as a residue reflection caused by pigeon poop in their radio antenna.) This radiation formed less than a million years after the Big Bang, at the moment when the universe had expanded and cooled just enough to let the first atoms form. Why then? Because before the formation of atoms, the universe was filled with a sea of charged particles such as electrons and protons. These charged particles absorb light, so that when they were freely roaming space no bit of light could last long before being absorbed. When protons and electrons formed atoms, the light could for the first time roam free.
When it first formed, the background radiation was at a temperature of around 4000 Kelvin (where 0 Kelvin is absolute zero and 273 Kelvin is the freezing point of water). Today, this background radiation is so stretched out it gives empty space a temperature everywhere of around 3 Kelvin, extremely cold but not absolute zero.
This radiation is amazingly uniform through space. But it isn’t perfectly uniform. Ever since Penzias and Wilson stumbled upon the world’s oldest fossil, scientists have been devising ways to study it in more and more detail. Today, the Planck telescope
released the finest-ever picture of the “bumpiness” in that radiation.
So what does it mean? It means, for one, that our best theories about the beginning of the universe are doing remarkably well when they might have failed. This is an enormous accomplishment. First of all, scientists accomplished something wonderful by creating theories that could fail. Secondly, when given the chance to fail, the theories held up. They made predictions about reality, and those predictions were borne out by observations, some of which were released today. The Big Bang, as envisioned by modern cosmology, really did happen. The picture at the beginning of this (already very long) blog entry is the best evidence yet. This is a triumph of human creativity.
But though we should celebrate our accomplishments today, we should also look ahead. Not every detail of Planck’s fantastic photograph can be explained by our best current theories. There are interesting patches in this image, strange irregularities, and no one yet knows what they mean. They might signal new physics. They might give us our first evidence for parallel universes. They might give us details about not just how the Big Bang happened, but why it occurred in the first place. In other words, the details of this image might bring us closer to ultimate question: How did we get here? And where is “here” anyway? The best discoveries answer some questions, but raise even bigger ones. Today’s discovery is a fine example.
I started this blog with a couple of everyday experiments that lead to our discovery of the distances to stars and galaxies, and eventually the birth of the universe itself. Now I’d like to finish with one more experiment you can try. All you need is a television not connected to a cable box or, if you don’t have that, you can just use this video
:
Now reach out and put your hand on the screen.
Around one out of every one hundred of those little bursts impacting your hand is caused by a bit of light left over from the Big Bang. When you touch that screen, you are touching the Big Bang itself.
We humans are creators. We created the knowledge that today lets us not only touch the Big Bang, but more importantly know what it is we are touching.
One thing I’ve rarely written about on this blog is Star Trek The Next Generation. In fact, as I search through my entries to see if I’ve ever mentioned my favorite television show, I find that I’ve only mentioned it twice, and the second time, here, I promised to quote Jean-Luc Picard. Better late than never.
I just rewatched one of my favorite episodes ever. It’s called “Darmok.”
For some, it’s the episode they most love to hate. Admittedly, the premise is ridiculous. An alien race called The Children of Tama that communicates only through metaphor, referencing history that of course only they could know. And yet The Children of Tama possess a complex technology at least as advanced as the Federation. We can’t understand what they’re trying to say, and vice-versa, despite the best efforts of the rather magical Universal Translator that rather amazingly makes everyone in the universe sound like Lawrence Olivier.
If you examine the science too closely (in this case, the science is linguistics, fortunately something I know little about), it falls apart. That’s true of Star Trek throughout, of course. Everything from the communicators on their chests (how is it that only the person Picard is trying to call actually hears it when he says “Picard to Dr. Crusher” for instance?) to the warp drive to the transporter beam to the frequent breeding of unrelated species is pretty awful science when you get down to it. My favorite is when they did a baryon sweep to get rid of heavy particles. Of course baryons are just protons and neutrons, so a baryon sweep would simply remove everything. But I digress.
I feel fortunate that I’m not smart enough to be bothered by the flaws in “Darmok.” Instead, for me the episode is itself a deeply moving metaphor. In many accounts, these races would be blasting away at one another, convinced the other is inferior because they speak gibberish. But ST TNG is different. It’s about understanding, “seeking out new life and new civilizations.” And this episode does it better than any I can think of.
My favorite part of the episode is the scene shown here. Picard is finally beginning to understand the metaphorical language of the Children of Tama. The alien captain (Dathon is his name, though we don’t learn that until the end of the episode) is dying, but he still wants to help Picard understand. Despite his pain, Dathon teaches Picard about Darmok and Jilad, two warriors who come together against a common foe, and thereby gain understanding about one another. Then, Dathon asks Picard for a story. This happens at about 4:20 of the clip:
Dathon: Kira at Bashi
This must be the metaphorical way of saying “tell me a story.” Then Dathon pauses for a beat, realizing that of course Picard still doesn’t understand. And Dathon switches to a metaphor that Picard does understand.
Dathon: Timba, his arms wide (said with the slightest hint of a giggle)
It was established earlier that “Timba, his arms wide” means “give as a gift” or something like that. It was the first phrase that Picard was able to understand, and it comes back here. Dathon uses his own language in an unconventional way, saying in effect “give to me the present of a story” instead of the more direct “tell me a story.” He’s creating a new usage that he has realized will help Picard understand. (Brilliant! This is, of course, what teaching is all about. No wonder I love this episode!) And Picard does understand, and shares a story that, in fact, is metaphorical of the situation Picard and Dathon face.
In the end, Dathon dies, and Picard barely escapes with his own life. Picard then averts a war with the Chidren of Tama by using enough of the language to express his limited understanding of what has occurred.
PICARD: Hail the Tamarian ship.
WORF: Aye, Captain.
TAMARIAN [on viewscreen]: Zinda! His face black, his eyes red
PICARD: Temarc! The river Temarc in winter.
TAMARIAN [on viewscreen]: Darmok?
PICARD: And Jalad. At Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.
TAMARIAN [on viewscreen]: Sokath, his eyes open!
PICARD: The beast at Tanagra. Uzani, his army. Shaka when the walls fell.
(Picard holds up Dathon’s journal, and the Tamarians beam it away)
TAMARIAN [on viewscreen]: Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. Mirab, with sails unfurled.
PICARD: (holds out the dagger) Temba, his arms open.
TAMARIAN [on viewscreen]: Temba at rest.
PICARD: Thank you.
While I have many, many favorite episodes of ST TNG, this one comes as close as any I can remember to being a perfect representation (maybe even a perfect metaphor) of why I watched the show in the first place.
Sometimes loggerhead babies don’t make it out of the nest. Here‘s a hatchling that was released by a researcher after being discovered still in the sand.
Yesterday, I wrote about why I teach, and how my reasons are not the reasons most teachers discuss. Their reasons are beautiful and moving, but they are not my own.
When I look at my own reasons to teach, however, I recognize that there are connections to more conventional reasons for teaching. I thought they were interesting:
1) I don’t want to change the world
BUT
The world is changing. The world is getting better – less violent, less polluted, smarter, healthier, more long-lived, and more conscious of the individual – and those changes owe a great deal to science and science education. Whether I want to or not, I believe that I do make the world better when I teach the values and principles of science.
2) I don’t believe I have a calling
BUT
I am the sum of my experiences. I have been influenced all my life by great teachers. I am carrying on their work through my own. Their ideas live on through me. That is maybe not a calling, but it is a connection that stretches beyond my own boundaries. Perhaps, if I am passionate and energetic and very lucky, I will inspire other teachers myself. And so it goes on.
3) I don’t believe in learning science because it’s important
BUT
The truth is that science is our only hope for survival. Life on Earth will someday come to an end, unless people with good explanations decide otherwise. By doing what I love, I perhaps can help the world survive.
Interesting. I’m happy that it works out that way – but it doesn’t change why I teach. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.
Lots of people have lots of reasons for teaching. Some are so beautifully stated that they bring tears to my eyes. But as I read them I realize that none of them are me. Their reasons are not my reasons.
I don’t want to change the world. When I’m really honest with myself, I’m not interested in this world-changing business. Joseph Campbell said, “When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.”
And yet. Andyetandyetandyet. I love the starfish story. The star thrower isn’t trying to change the world. Yet we the readers recognize that she is changing the world, one starfish at a time. This to me is the essence of teaching. The world might be burning down, the barbarians might be pounding at the gate, but I, as a teacher, will stop, catch a breath, help that one student understand that algebra problem, show that one kid some amazing effect, give that one person one more experience they didn’t expect to have. Maybe it matters later, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t care. In that one moment, that moment of connection, that moment of shared effort for a common goal, there is beauty, and elegance, and poetry.
I don’t believe I have a calling. I believe we make our own destiny. I don’t believe I have a God-given gift, because I don’t believe in God. That’s more than an existential question for me, it’s a philosophy. I believe we create our own meaning. If I’m a good teacher, and I believe that I am, it’s because I’ve chosen to become so. I own my choice. In a powerful sense, my choice is me.
I don’t think people need to understand science. Again, Joseph Campbell – “Go on, live your life, it’s a good life, you don’t need this. I don’t believe in being interested in a subject because it’s said to be important or interesting. But, I believe, with the proper introduction, this subject may just catch you.” I believe science is a joy and a pleasure. Certainly it’s useful, but that’s incidental. And, incidentally, the usefulness comes down to joy and pleasure itself, if you follow it far enough. For what is life for, if not for joy and pleasure? The process of learning, of building explanations, of building castles in my mind, and the process of building a world from bricks and metal are one and the same. If you disagree, well then, go on and live your life. Find your own passions. I’m not trying to change the world. Even if, along the way, I do.
Whitman said, “What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here, that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse.” My verse is my work, my teaching, the starfish I’ve tossed and will continue to toss. Where do they go after I’ve tossed them? That I do not know, but in that moment of that connection, that act based on blind belief that one moment really does matter, therein you will find my story. Carl Sagan said it best. “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.” I’m in love. And so I teach.
I’d been looking forward to Sean Carroll’s new book for months, and now it’s over. No matter, because I’m reading it again. It’s that good.
Carroll’s written a book that hits me pretty much exactly where I am in my understanding of particle physics and the Higgs boson. I feel like I have a much deeper understanding today than I did a week ago. He also has some great lines that make the whole pursuit of the Higgs not just an intellectual adventure but a deeply human story. Here Carroll describes the moment when the LHC’s beam was switched on for the first time.
“It was early morning Geneva time, but California is nine hours behind, so it was late the previous night for us. Computer monitors were set up for everyone to follow along, although the strain on CERN’s servers soon broke the Internet feed. Pizza was ordered and passed around, helping the assembled scientists settle into a comfort zone. (A substantial fraction of the atoms in the body of a typical physicist were once in the form of pizza.)”
A Future Physicist – Delicious!
I’m going to give Carroll’s description of the Higgs, or at any rate my understanding of his description, in outline form. Maybe it’ll help you understand, too. Probably it will just make things clearer for me. If you’re intrigued, read the book. It’s outstanding.
1) Everything is a field. The force fields are the easiest to understand, and of these I like to think of electromagnetism. Imagine holding a magnet in your palm. All around that magnet you can picture little numbers. Those numbers tell you the strength of the magnetic field at that particular point. You could do the same thing with a charged rod, except now it would be the electric field strength. Everywhere in the universe that magnet (or that charged rod) cause the field to have a number – very far away the number is indistinguishable from zero, while close up the number takes on a value that shows both how strong the source is and how near the source the point lied.
A little harder to picture is the idea that particles themselves are just disturbances in a field. To make it easy, thing of a “person field.” Everywhere there’s a person, the value of the field is 1. Everywhere there’s not a person, the person field is 0. This is not particularly useful for people, because we’re all different. For elementary particles, though, this idea is quite useful, because every electron is identical to every other electron. The electron field, then, shows where electrons are and are not.
Now the Higgs field. Not the Higgs particle; I’m actually not even going to talk about that in this entry. The Higgs field is what matters, as Carroll emphasizes again and again. The Higgs field is more like the electric or magnetic field than the electron field. It’s a value everywhere in space. (One difference is that electric and magnetic fields have a direction, too, but the Higgs field does not. For this reason, sometimes it’s called a scalar field.)
The biggest difference, though, is that while electric and magnetic fields are generally zero unless there’s something nearby, the Higgs field always has a value (in fact, the same value) everywhere. It’s like being surrounded by air, or water, your whole life and never realizing it. We can remove air or water if we know how, but as far as we know we can’t remove the Higgs. Wherever we go, there the Higgs field is, with its non-zero value permeating space.
2) Fields can interact. Carroll’s fine example of this is beta decay. In this process a neutron fires of an electron and an antineutrino, becoming a proton in the process. In fact we now know that one down quark in the neutron turns into one up quark. No matter. Picture the fields. Where there was a “1″ in the neutron field (or down quark field, if you prefer), there is a gradual interaction that causes the neutron (down quark) field to drop to zero and the electron, antineutrino and proton (up quark) fields to all gain what the neutron field lost.
What about the Higgs field? Particles interact with the Higgs field, but they don’t change their identities. Instead, the Higgs field changes how the particles behave. Why?
3) The non-zero value of the Higgs field in empty space is the key.
“If the Higgs were like other fields, resting at zero in empty space, its interaction strength with other particles would simply measure how likely it would be for the Higgs (particle) to interact with that particle if they happened to pass by each other . . . But because the (field) is not zero, it’s like the other particles are interacting with it constantly – and it’s those persistent, inevitable interactions with the background that create the mass of the particle.” (p 127)
It’s the constant interaction between the non-zero Higgs field (the ocean in which we live) and the particles of matter from which we’re made that give our particles (electrons and quarks, at least) mass. (The protons and neutrons that make up most of our mass actually get theirs from the energy of the strong interaction, but that’s a story for another time.)
There’s much, much more to the story than this, of course, but what I like so much about Carroll’s book is he lays out the basic argument in simple and accessible language, and then adds on the complexity bit by bit to take the reader deeper and deeper along the journey. It’s a powerful approach that forges a new path between the purely journalistic approach that superficially covers the science and the overly technical approach that loses me (and others, I suspect) in jargon and detail. Enjoy the book the first time, as I will the second.
This man is charismatic, humble and self-effacing. I think I like him.
I wish I could explain to him why he’s wrong about me.
It’s so interesting to see how our society has twisted and distorted the idea of education, so that almost everyone has the wrong idea. Education isn’t about gathering the collected wisdom of the world. Rather, education is about learning to create new knowledge. The best method we humans have found for this is the invention of good explanations through conjecture, criticism, and testing. Because the potential for creation is infinite, we are not in fact 5% of the way there, nor 1%, nor even 0.0001% along the path to knowing everything. We are, in fact, infinitely far away from complete knowledge. And we always will be. There is an infinite amount of knowledge of which I am ignorant.
And yet I am an atheist. How can I possibly say “there is no god”? I can’t, and in fact that’s not what I say. Instead, I say that supernatural explanations are always bad explanations, because they are infinitely variable. They don’t help me get closer to truth, because there is no conceivable way in which such explanations can deal with reality. If supernatural explanations do, in fact, intersect with reality, they cease to be supernatural explanations. I can’t study supernatural explanations, subject them to criticism, test them, improve them. This is what makes them bad explanations.
So I don’t fit the gentleman’s definition of an atheist. I also don’t fit his definition of an agnostic. I very much care if there is a God who acts in the world, because such a God would be part of the universe, and I want to understand the universe through good explanations. Supernatural explanations don’t get me there.
But, you say, what if that’s really the way the world is? What if the supernatural really does affect the world? Won’t your method just miss it? Won’t you be like the scientists of the late 1700s who insisted that rocks cannot fall from the sky?
Here’s the thing: everything is real. If something is not real, it’s not a thing. Only because things like consciousness and intuition are so complex do they remain shrouded in the sort of mystery that allows us to talk ourselves into the idea that something fishy is going on. But think about it. Thoughts are real. We’ve seen them (go to 9:00 in the video).
If a thought of God somehow appears in your mind, that thought came from somewhere. It created an effect, and we know that every effect has a demonstrable cause. Trace back the cause far enough, and you’ve found the source of that effect. If at some point you find a way for the supernatural to effect the real, then you’ve discovered new physics – and in the process turned God into a legitimate subject for scientific study.
So, does God exist? If He does, then He’s part of this universe, and we can study Him. And maybe even take away the annoying capital letters. Theology then would become a branch of the physical sciences. How does God do it? Surely not radio waves, for any old receiver should pick those up. Is there some new signalling medium, so far unknown to science, used to communicate directly to human brains? If so, let’s find it!
So in one sense the speaker is right. I am a seeker. But I will seek, always, to understand the world through good explanations. I’m not an atheist because I know everything. I’m an atheist because I’m at the beginning of infinity – and always will be.
My first book, called The Turtle and the Universe, was published by Prometheus Books in July 2008. You can read about it by clicking on the link above.
