My New Science Education Career

As Fluff told you in the previous essay, I have moved to Strasbourg, France. I was really relieved to get here, and could not have done it without extensive help from my daughter and French son-in-law. They had almost everything ready for us, and are helping us with the rest.

I joked that I was going to be a full-time grandpa. But, as it turns out, that is mostly what is happening. I had fantasies about traveling in Europe, at least in the “Schengen zone” where the only thing you need is a European passport. Not all Schengen countries are in the European Union, with a common currency, but they erect no barriers to one country’s approved residents traveling to another. I thought I would go to see all the natural areas, and continue posting videos and essays about the natural landscape of France. But I am having plenty of challenges even without leaving Strasbourg. Just learning our way around, establishing a bank account, learning to use the tram, and buying a few things keeps me and my wife occupied when I am not reading, writing little essays like this, or staying with my grandkids. The cultural transition I am now experiencing will take several months. Then I can think about travel.

That is my new science education career: teaching my grandkids about the wonders of science. There are a lot of things that I have taken for granted ever since I was a little child, such as the fact the Earth is roughly spherical; it rotates at an angle; it revolves around the sun, and this accounts for the seasons. I just assumed everybody knew this, but my grandkids will have to learn it from me, or from school, hopefully both. And to do this, my wife and I just bought them a globe, nearly identical to the one that I had when I was a child. The fact that the Earth turns, rather than the sun moving across the sky, is not something that you can just see from the ground. It is something you have to deduce from evidence. I feel anew the sense of discovery I had as a child.

The globe also has raised mountains, which will allow me to show the kids how Tibet differs from France in more ways than one. It will also allow me to explain rain shadows. I can also explain the Gulf Stream, which is why Strasbourg, at 48 degrees north, has a moderate climate.

I assumed that everyone knew that when it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern, and vise versa. But apparently this is not true. A wild right-wing commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, was so angry at global warming science that he would grab at every bit of information he could find to discredit it. In a recent year, he heard that Australia had snow in August. D’Souza proudly declared, how can there be snow in August if there is global warming? He did not know August is winter in Australia. This is something my grandkids will know before they finish elementary school. D’Souza was briefly the president of the King’s College, a fundamentalist Christian college in New York. He was forced to resign, not for ignorance, but for the fact that he had an affair with the wife of one of the administrators of the college.

The only problem with the globe is that it is labeled in Italian. But here in Europe, no matter which country you are in, you are surrounded by other languages. Italy is only a few hundred kilometers south, closer than Spain. So this is not really a problem.

And this is just the first step. Within the next year or so, we will get the grandkids a microscope (surprisingly cheap) which will open new worlds to them, I hope, as it did for me. And a music synthesizer. I hope they will grow up learning music as a language and a form of expression, not just as a pleasant (or annoying) background to other activities. A telescope? Maybe not, since, so far, every night and most days have been cloudy, thanks to the Gulf Stream.

I even thought about making videos and writing essays in French about science and nature. But it will take a long time for me to have enough fluency in French to do this. I will never be another Jamy Gourmaud. I will just never speak or write French well enough. The French language is the subject of my next essay.

 

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.

The Caveman’s Shadow

This is a brief meditation upon how science has changed everything we see.

If a caveman stood straight up (which he could; the old movies showing cavemen dragging their knuckles are ridiculous) at midday, he would see his shadow just like every other sunny day. He would not have realized that his shadow pointed straight north.

If he had done so on the first day of spring or fall (assuming he knew about what day this was), he would most certainly not have realized that the length of his shadow would be exactly the same as his height if he was at 45 degrees north or south. Or that the reason for this was that the Earth revolved around the sun and was tilted relative to the plane of its revolution. He would just see his shadow. But today we can look at our shadow and see a whole story about the movement of the Earth.

In this and many other ways, the scientific viewpoint changes everything we see.

There Are a Lot of Scientific Questions a Citizen-scientist Can Answer

To get answers to some of the biggest questions in the world today, we need to have literally millions of data points and analyze them with large computers. The best example is global climate change. In order to say that the Earth is getting warmer, we must have measurements from almost everywhere, all year, for many years. You can’t just stick your head out the window and tell if global warming is happening or not.

But there are some scientific questions you can answer by just looking out the window.

One of them is the question about whether there is an infinite number of stars in the universe. Now, we have all heard about the astronomers who have looked far out into space and, starting with Edwin Hubble, reconstructed the history of the universe. But what if you don’t have a big telescope? You can answer the question anyway.

The brightness of a star decreases as the square of the distance; a star twice as far away is four times dimmer. Therefore, very faraway stars are practically invisible to most of us. But if there were truly an infinite number of stars, their light, however faint, would add up to an infinite brightness. (Hard to believe? Well, what part of infinite do you not understand?) When you look out the window and see that the sky is dark at night, you know that the universe is finite.

You could solve the problem by putting it into the form of integral calculus. Maybe I could have done so back in 1976 when I understood calculus. But you don’t need to.

There are probably lots of other fascinating scientific questions that do not require equipment, a budget, or expertise to answer.

Hypatia, You Are Not Forgotten

The movie Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, is one of the few fictional movies ever to be reviewed in Science magazine. I have now seen it three times and have come to understand it. It is one of the few essential movies that you need to see to understand the meaning of science in the human mind. You’d better see it at least once.

Hypatia of Alexandria (Egypt), in the fourth century of the Christian Era, was a philosopher and teacher. She accepted students of diverse faiths, including a Roman pagan and a Christian. She taught them that if two things are equal to a third, then all are equal, and she insisted that this applies to herself and to her students: she the (we would say today) atheist, and her pagan and Christian students, were all equal.

Hypatia’s faith was different from those of any of her students. They believed that truths were revealed by one or more gods, while she believed that the highest pursuit of the human spirit was to understand the universe itself, to decipher what it is telling us. In particular, she wanted to understand why the planets did not move in a perfect circle around the Earth. Ptolemy had said that the planets and sun traced their own little circles as they orbited the Earth, but this seemed whimsical: if the universe is perfect, why should these little epicycles be necessary? Then she found out that the philosopher Aristarchus, centuries previously, had suggested that the planets, including Earth, went around the sun. But if the universe was built on perfect circles, then the Earth must describe a perfect circle around the sun, which it does not: sometimes the sun was smaller (more distant) and dimmer than at other times. Then she figured out that the Earth travels in an ellipse around the sun. After she died, and her writings were lost, it took another 1,200 years until Johannes Kepler rediscovered this truth. To Hypatia, the universe had to have mathematical perfection, and it was our job to understand it. This remains the fundamental belief of scientists, although we now recognize that a great deal of historical contingency, what we might call messiness (for example, the Big Bang created globs of galaxies, not perfectly spaced ones) that Hypatia might have found unacceptable.

Alexandria was going through successive waves of turmoil all during this time. Unlike Hypatia and her students, the adherents of religions all hated each other. The Egyptian pagans attacked the Christians, then the Christians attacked the Egyptians and destroyed the library of Alexandria, the most famous condensation of knowledge in all of history, gleefully rejoicing in the burning of scientific books. Then the Christians turned on the Jews. The Romans couldn’t do much; they were the nominal rulers, but the Empire was in decline and the Roman soldiers couldn’t do much. Hypatia’s Roman student became the Consul of Alexandria, and he very publicly loved Hypatia. Her Christian student became a famous bishop. They tried to keep violence from getting out of hand, but the majority of Christians did not listen to the peaceful bishop; instead they followed the radicals who called upon Christians, in the name of Jesus, to stone to death everyone who did not agree with them, and this eventually included Hypatia. The charges leveled against Hypatia were that Scripture forbade a woman to teach in public. They should just stay home and, if they should happen to venture out in public, keep their damned mouths shut. Hypatia spoke in public and was a scholar. This was plenty of reason for the Christians to push her to the altar, strip her, stone her, and drag her mutilated body through the streets. A young Christian man, who had been Hypatia’s slave but whom she liberated even though he sexually assaulted her, tried to save her, but not very hard.

In this image, Hypatia tries to save scrolls from the Library of Alexandria as it is being pillaged and burnt.

All of the religions that were concentrated together in Alexandria were guilty of killing people of other religions. But in Alexandria during Hypatia’s time, it was clearly the Christians who carried out the most and the worst violence, and who eventually became the leaders of the western world. The leaders of this violence became saints, such as Saint Cyril.

Hypatia was troubled by the fact that the events on the Earth were so messy and random, while all around the Earth, the heavens were perfect, though in an elliptical rather than a circular way. The recurring imagery of the movie is the ellipse—such as the circular opening in the library vault, seen from the side—and a view of Earth from outer space, focusing down onto Alexandria, and then receding again into the indifferent stars.

Today, most of the American opponents of scientific truth are evangelical Christians, and they are closer to using violence against scientists than we usually think. American evangelical Christians do not even want to question whether the proclamations of their preachers and of Donald Trump are consistent with the Bible, much less with scientific and historical truth. At other times and in other places, there are other enemies of truth: Stalin killed geneticists, and Islamic terrorists don’t want anybody to disagree with them about anything. But for me, here in America and now, it is the evangelical Christians whom I consider the most dangerous, just as they were to Hypatia of Alexandria. The violent Christians (that is, most of them) set science back a millennium. Many of them appear to want to do so again.

Whether the tragedy of Hypatia is repeated again, or not, we should not forget her or the power of a woman’s mind.

A Young Scientist and a Solstice

June 21 is typically considered to be the summer solstice (for some reason this year it was June 20). And 50 years ago on this day, this budding young scientist (age 9) decided he wanted to calculate the latitude of Lindsay, California, where he was growing up.

It was quite simple, really. On this day each year the sun is directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer, about 23 and a half degrees north latitude. Therefore all I had to do was measure the length of a shadow cast by a vertical stick and do some simple trigonometry, and I was able to calculate how many degrees north of the Tropic we were. In order to get the vertical stick, I used a broken arrow embedded in mud, and used a protractor to make sure it was vertical. I had to do this precisely at midday, of course. I seem to recall my answer was pretty close to the latitude shown on the map.

This was an exciting thing for a nine-year-old boy. It was one of my earliest moments as a scientist. I was putting my faith into action: faith that the universe followed natural laws, and faith that humans could learn truths about the universe by measurement and calculation. This is exactly the kind of faith, and the kind of curiosity, we should encourage in children.

By the way, “solstice” comes from “sol,” the sun, and “stasis,” unmoving. The solstice is the day on which the sun appears to stop moving and reverse its direction, as viewed from the Earth.

What is Faith?

Okay, so this doesn’t sound like a science essay. But I assure you it does fit in with science. I want to share a story that I heard on Krista Tippett’s On Being, an NPR show, on September 24 of this year. I retell this story from memory, since I do not have time to listen to the whole podcast over again, but you can hear it at this link.

Dr. Guy Consolmagno is the current Vatican Astronomer, at the Vatican Observatory, and Dr. George Coyne is the recently retired astronomer. Now, whoa. You may not have known there even was a Vatican Observatory. Wasn’t this the church that condemned Galileo for believing the Earth was not the center of the universe, and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake? Well, it took a while for the Vatican to catch up with science, but in 1891 Pope Leo XIII founded the Vatican Observatory. (Now you know what the URL suffix “.va” stands for.) Instead of resisting science, the Catholic church decided to pursue it.

Dr. Coyne told a story of speaking at a convention of astronomers one time. He was wearing his priestly vestments. Then someone in the audience asked him, “Father,” not Dr. Coyne or George, “What does it feel like to go to work each day with the realization that you already know all of the answers?” Coyne’s response was swift and sure. He tore off his robe (I assume he was clothed underneath, and not in Mormon magical undergarments) and let everyone know that faith is not about knowing the answers, but about the assurance that the universe can be, as each day and year passes, better and better understood: our efforts at research will be rewarded. Even if we never understand it fully.

That is a way of describing the fundamental faith that all scientists have. And it is a leap of faith: there is no logical reason to believe that our brains, which evolved to maximize the fitness of genes and individuals, should have any way of understanding the universe. We evolved intelligence because it gave us a better ability to survive and to form associations with or to dominate other human beings. It evolved as a tool for evolutionary success, in the pursuit of which rationalization was just as good as reason. What our minds tell us need not be true, except in the matter of telling us where the edge of the cliff, or the next meal, is; it can be total fantasy, and natural selection favors it, so long as it allows us to form associations and to dominate others. I consider it an astonishing thing that our brains just happen to be suited for understanding the universe also. Even though very few people can actually understand dark energy or superstrings, at least we can understand the reasoning.

Keep the faith, brethren. We can understand the world, despite the political and religious and economic forces of hatred and unreason that try to keep us from doing so.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Two: The Heavens

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about the vast gulf between science and religion with how to determine what is true. I now continue this series about how different science and religion are from one another.

Before Copernicus and Galileo, most people viewed the sky as some kind of sphere or series of spheres on which the stars rotated around the Earth, and each planet (as well as the sun and moon) had its own sphere. Either that or they thought the sun, moon, and stars were gods. This was certainly the view of the writer of Genesis 1, who used the term “raqia” for what is usually translated “firmament.” Did you ever wonder why Genesis called the sky “firmament,” which sounds like “firm”? Because “raqia” is derived from “raqa,” which means “to beat out,” or stamp out, often used for metal beat into a thin sheet. This is the way the word is used in Exodus 39:3, Numbers 16:39, Isaiah 40:19, and Jeremiah 10:9. It refers to trampling or stamping with the foot in 2 Samuel 22:43, Ezekiel 6:11 and 25:6. Figuratively, this can mean “an expanse,” but literally it refers to a metal dome. (See here.)

This does not mean, of course, that the Biblical authors were somehow anti-scientific. They shared the view that nearly everyone had until recently. Copernicus believed in the heavenly spheres; he just made the sun the center, and Earth was on a sphere. Nobody accuses Copernicus of being anti-scientific. It was not until the twentieth century that scientists understood that many of the “nebulae” were faraway galaxies. But the Bible certainly cannot be used as a literally accurate basis for astronomy. Many scientific Christians simply point out that this was not the purpose of Genesis in the first place.

The Bible refers to stars falling from the sky. Isaiah said it (Is. 34:4), Jesus said it (Matthew 24), and Revelation uses the phrase at least twice, in chapters 6 and 8. Of course this cannot literally happen. We all use the term “falling star” figuratively for meteors. No problem, unless you base your science on the Bible. The Biblical view of the universe, like all views of the universe before Kepler and Newton, is vastly different from the modern view shared by everyone, even most creationists.