What Do You Do with Your Scientific Knowledge?

 Scientific knowledge is not just a private pleasure. It is something to be shared.

A few months back, in my other blog, I shared a story about a kind of Republican you seldom see any more, and I used my childhood optometrist as an example: Dr. James E. Miller of Exeter, California. I recently found an old newspaper clipping about him, from about 1972.

Dr. Miller loved astronomy. Not just looking at stars and planets, but understanding how far away they are and the motions of the planets. He must have felt the kind of excitement that Galileo and Copernicus felt when they realized that the story of the stars was very different from what they had heard when growing up. Dr. Miller was a conservative Christian, but I suspect he must have agreed with Galileo that the Bible told us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

He bought a transparent celestial sphere, with planets and stars, not for his own enjoyment but to teach young people about the heavens. Two places he did this was at Boy Scout camps, helping boys earn their astronomy merit badges, and at SciCon, a science camp from back in the days when there weren’t very many science camps.

On two occasions this month, I got out my telescope (which I keep in my university lab) to look at Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. I cannot see them very well, and my telescope is very difficult to use. Mars, though at its closest approach to Earth, just looks like a pink disc. I could just barely see Saturn’s rings. I invited students to come and look at the planets. Two of them did. The excitement was not in the quality of the image, but in the experience of having photons from the planets go straight to your retina. One of the students exclaimed, on seeing Saturn’s rings, exclaimed with great excitement, “I see it!”

I also asked the two students why Mars is red. The red comes from oxidized iron. On Earth, this usually means a reaction with oxygen. But Mars has no oxygen. What caused the iron to oxidize, that is, to lose electrons? I hinted it was something that an oxygen derivative largely shields the Earth from. It was the student who was not a science major who guessed right: UV radiation. The red surface of Mars is only a few centimeters deep.

On those evenings last week, I was doing what Dr. Miller did. And I’m pretty sure that I got a lot of my enthusiasm for all the rest of my science teaching from Dr. Miller.

A Kind of Republican You Will No Longer Find, Example 1

On the day that I am posting this, Donald Trump is visiting Tulsa for his first big rally leading up to the 2020 Election. VP Mike Pence is going to wander around Greenwood, the district in Tulsa where, 99 years ago, whites massacred blacks and destroyed one of the most prosperous black communities in the United States. Pence, an evangelical Christian, is going to meditate on how wonderful a peacemaker and reconciler Trump is, and how all black people should love Him no matter what He says or does. Thus far, as of two hours ago, no violence has erupted, despite the expectations of the white racists that blacks would massacre white people or at least destroy their businesses. Al Sharpton spoke at a rally last night, but the associated demonstrations were peaceful and positive—a Juneteenth celebration of black progress, rather than a violent blast against ongoing white racism. I will keep you posted about what happens next.

(Photo from Radio KWGS website)

There are many moderate Republicans who are ashamed of Trump, but Trump is such a powerful voice of hatred that these moderate Republicans maintain their silence and fall in line behind Him.

But this has not always been the case. There was a time when the Republican Party was not as full of hatred as it is today. I have fond memories of Republicans who, even though I now believe they were wrong, were constructive. I will share their stories with you in the next two essays.

When I was in fifth grade, it became abundantly clear to me that I needed glasses. The teacher wrote test questions on the board for us to answer, and I could not read them, nor would the teacher allow me to approach the board. A straight-A student, I was a little upset, though my final grade was hardly affected by it.

I got my glasses in sixth grade. The optometrist who examined me and prescribed them was James O. Miller of Exeter, California. I almost immediately revered him. He was a practitioner, not a scientist, but he found all aspects of science fascinating. He got most of it from a little magazine, The Griffith Observer, published by the Griffith Observatory, to which Miller was drawn by his interest in optics. Dr. Miller explained everything to me, even though I was just a little kid. He drew a diagram to show me what caused my nearsightedness (the focus from the lens was not on the retina). In a larger measure than I probably realize, he set me on the path of becoming a scientist.

Dr. Miller was a staunch Republican back in the days when Richard Nixon was running for president and Ronald Reagan was governor of California. One of my eye checkup appointments was during the 1968 Republican convention. He had the radio on in his office, and his assistant, as instructed, told him who the VP nominee was. He had never heard of Spiro Agnew. (Have you?) Miller was also what we would today call a Quiverfull Christian. He had so many kids that they had their own basketball team. I am not making this up. He joined bus trips to Sacramento to lobby for conservative causes. I was on one of those buses with him.

But his Christian views would be almost unrecognizable by modern evangelicals. Like Loren Wilkinson (see previous essay), Dr. Miller considered everything in the natural world to be joyous evidence of God and something that Christians should protect and cherish. Most modern evangelicals consider the Gaia Hypothesis to be paganism, but when Dr. Miller told me about it, he said, “I never saw such clear evidence of God in my life.” Christians like Miller are now rare, or at least obscure.

James Miller died of a sudden heart attack while he was jogging. He was enjoying health and nature until the last moment.