Am I Getting Smaller Or the Universe Larger?

I can vividly recall laying on a gurney starring at the ceiling of a hospital with a strange aplomb accepting my simian ancestry. Raised in a conservative Christian environment I had long "fought the good fight" against the liberal scientists that tried to teach people that they were nothing more than monkeys who came from grown up germs. My kind valiantly battled the scientific community who were in our estimation little more than the ideological progeny of the Nazi eugenicists. But, there I was. Starring at the ceiling. Recovering from massive surgery after an appendix explosion gone wrong. As my body was repairing itself I was repairing my thinking. Cooly, calmly I realized that the presence of this vestigial organ that nearly took my life was proof that I am a descendant of the great apes.

Right there I got a little smaller. My dimensions didn't change, nor the room's, but my size in relation to my ancestry, time scale, and universe had vastly changed. It was much akin to the sensation of looking out a plane and seeing, perhaps, not my own house, but the tens of thousands like it and feeling, well, like jack-crap, puny, insignificant and somewhat humiliated that I ever thought otherwise.

It isn't the first time one of these revolutions has happened.

Eratosthenes noticed the differing angles of shadows at high noon in wells and measuring rods. From that he calculated that the world was round. There was a whole other side to it that he knew nothing of! Was there anything there or was it completely void since everything would fall off? Eratosthenes, too, got a little bit smaller.

Galileo, as is familiar to many, noticed the moons of other planets orbiting something other than the earth - Jupiter. Could it be that not everything revolved around the earth? Could it be, in fact, quite the opposite? Perhaps we were the revolving one. The solar system got a little bigger and Galileo got a little bit tinier.

Columbus was headed for the Orient when something got in his way--the "West Indies." There were two whole continents that had previously been unaccounted for. We were quite a bit smaller than had been anticipated.

Darwin, after circumnavigating the entire globe sampling from seemingly every corner of the world, realized that everything living today came from very different living things in the past. Things change. We change. We changed. Like climbing altitude in a plane we can trace the unbroken chain of life all the way back to simple enzymes and RNA trapped in a lipid bubble.

And we get smaller.

Or, does our world just get larger?

Sitting in that hospital room I don't think I got smaller. The universe got bigger. With every discovery, with every unanswered question answered, with each intrepid person that will dare to question, seek and ask our universe gets a little bit more amazing and grandiose. So, the next time you feel puny and insignificant looking out the window of a plane or standing before some personal existential truth remember that crushing insignificance is only one perspective change away from awe, wonder and worship.

Darwin Regrets Not Enjoying the Finer Things in Life

Excerpt from his autobiography:

"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding the general laws out of large collections of facts. ..If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week...The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Science is Gospel

I don’t watch much news. It isn’t that I don’t care. It’s just depressing. It makes me feel powerless. I have no power to change any of the awful things that are happening in the world and I know it. Furthermore it’s nearly completely one sided - only the awful, the apocalyptic, the disastrous, the crises. They hardly cover any of the beautiful, the inspiring, the moving, the touching. That doesn’t sell. It doesn’t titillate.

Except.

One genre of news - science and technology. I read that quite closely. Why? Because there’s always something exciting, new, innovative, revolutionary. It’s a perpetual dawn! You can read the science/tech section of the news and come away saying, “YES!”

Science is gospel.

As many of you from a Christian background may know, ‘gospel’ means ‘good news’ (In Greek it’s euangelion. We get the word ‘angel’ from the same root as the last part of that word. So, I always see a glorious angel trumpeting good news when I think of that word.).  The fact of the matter is that there is great, glorious, good news happening in the sciences everyday - the Large Hadron Collider, genetic mapping and engineering, clean energy, steps closer to fusion, new species constantly being found, stretches of the universe seen for the first time, new fossils exposing our and our relative's past, medical breakthroughs, computer innovations, technological advancements...The list goes on!!!

Bottom line, read more science and technology news. It’s gospel and it’s good for your soul.

Intelligent Design and Falsifiability

Here's the difference between science and Intelligent Design: one is falsifiable and one isn't.

"I believe gravity causes things to become attracted to each other."
"No, it doesn't."
"Fine, let's put it to the test!"
[Apple is let go and suspends in mid-air]

That's preposterous, but at least it's falsifiable.

Here's how the other conversation would go:

"I believe Poseidon created the seas and all that is in them."
"No, he didn't!"
"O, ya?! Prove that he didn't!!"

Do you see the difference?

That's yet another reason why many scientists cry fowl when religion tries to take a foot hold in science. It doesn't follow the same rules as everything else. Science by its very nature has to be falsifiable. Intelligent Design may be a perfectly reasonable personal explanation of how the universe came to be and life and complexity within it, but religion in sheep's clothes can be a dangerous thing scientifically.

Science is...Childlike Questions

Heather, my wonderful sister and exemplar scientific thinker, has told me a story of discussing with her her grad school advisor about what good science is. He said that good science is good questions.


Good questions are...

• Focused - neither too broad nor too narrow.

Goldilocks

• Valuable- after having answered the question will our lives be any more enriched? If not, scrap it.

• Answerable - will you actually be able to answer the question?

• Insightful - I view getting a bachelors in biology as studying for years to ask one really good graduate school thesis question. All that study for one question. It takes alot of knowledge to ask good questions.

• Narrow in asking, broad in implication - Heather also spoke of her sage of an advisor stating that a good question is one that may be small, but answers a larger question. For example, a researcher doesn't study planaria reproduction because they want to only know more about planaria. They want to use that knowledge to know something about the whole tree of life, like how species evolve. One doesn't study aphids, one studies a branch in the ecological web as a whole. One doesn't study whale digestion, but how animals convert chemical energy into biological energy. Et cetera.

By implication, science is being curious. It's wanting to know how the world around you works, why it works and what we can do with that knowledge.  


It's wide eyed wonder about the truly ineffably amazing state of the universe around us.  It's mystery.  It's intrigue. It's the excitement of discovery. It's adventure.

Science is being unsettled. Unsettled by not knowing 'why', 'how'. It's not being okay with standard myths, theories, explanations.

Science is being hungry for answers. It's insatiability.

Science is argument. It's caring enough about reality to debate, to confront, to challenge.

Science is holding reality in reverence above all else - popular opinion, dogma, authority, tradition.

That's difficult business, though. Easier said than done. Life is distracting.  

How can we keep ourselves curious? Vested in the nature of reality?  


By staying childlike.

How do children think?

• With New Eyes - Everyone remembers their first kiss. There is something impactful about doing something for the first time. Children experience that all the time. You've heard it many times (so much so that its lost its impact, haha, how ironic) that familiarity breeds contempt. The opposite can be just as true, new eyes breed wonder. How can you get new eyes again? One way is to study widely. I've learned the most about English by studying other languages. I've only realized my Americanness by traveling to China. Read fringe thinkers. Learn about other fields of inquiry. You may be surprised at the insights you'll gain.

• Tabla Rasa - kids don't come with baggage. They have no expectations, no preconceptions. They aren't going to look for something a certain way, they just look.

• Relating It Back to Yourself - I've read Richard Dawkins talk about how personally kids can sometimes answer science questions like, why are flowers pretty? "So I can enjoy them!" the child might respond. While that in and of itself isn't the most model scientific thinking, it does show how that kids naturally have a way of making it about themselves. That can be a good thing. It can be a powerful motivator. If we could empower that same young thinker's mind with knowledge she/he might say something more along the lines of, "Flowers are beautiful to attract insects to carry their pollen to reproduce and I can't help but enjoy how incredibly ingenious, creative, beautiful that mutualistic symbiosis is!!!"  Studying biology for me has been an unbelievable journey of self discovery. Every fossil I read about, every biological mechanism and processy I learn about tells me something about myself by teaching me how I work, where I came from or about the processes that made me. It's personal. And, that is powerfully motivating to keep learning.

• They Get Dirty - Kids love gross. Why don't adults? Kids love mud. Why don't adults? Kids want to explore more than they want to be proper, to experience more than stay presentable, to satiate their curiosity over their desire to be accepted, adventure over safety. Bottom line, get dirty! You just might remember how good the cool embrace of mud can feel again!!

• Kids Take Time to Do Absolutely Nothing - You should, too. Remember having summer off? Think about when you have your best thoughts: while driving, while showering, while running, while meditating, while praying, while quiet, while relaxed, while letting your thoughts wander, meander, explore - unguided, unimposed, borderless, unfettered, natural, freeflow thoughts and inquiries. Figure out a way to maximize your time doing those activities. Nothing may be the most important thing you do all day.

• Kids Keep Asking and Asking and Asking... - I recently went to a presentation on butterflies. The local expert blew me away by how much he knew about species identification, diet, range, migration patterns, ecology, population threats, how to start a butterfly garden, etc. His knowledge was truly prodigious. I was taken aback by how easily he was stumped by the simplest of questions, though: why do butterfly wings have scales? I mean, the most obvious part of a butterfly is its wings and the most obvious part of their wings are the colored scales. So, why hadn't he thought of it? Well, I should be so hard on him. His interests were elsewhere. But, I did learn something that day from that question. Sometimes the best camouflage is obviousness. The most obvious place to look is often the last. One of the keys to exposing these cloaked blatants is to keep pushing the questions. Force yourself to question.  Don’t let it stop at the surface.  Keeping on pushing it and asking ‘why’ one more time and then one more time and then one more time...

This is my life's message. One of the major things that I want my life to represent right now is that it’s okay to question, to change your mind, to go a different direction, change your path. No, no, scratch that. It's essential to question. Questioning is a holy, sacred activity, integral to truly living, truly experiencing, truly seeing. We must not tell reality what she is, only listen by questioning.