Solar Flares and Twitter Follies

Solar Flare

So, it was an odd week. During an intense solar flare there were widespread reports of huge aurora borealis displays, often seen much farther south than usual. We might have been able to catch a glimpse of these but for one thing. We had a week of socked-in, cloud cover with intermittent rain and snow. No hope of seeing the sky.

I started physiotherapy for a neck problem seemingly caused by normal aging and arthritis — an impinged nerve that sends pain into my shoulder, down into my arm, and tingles all the way to my fingers. The exercises my therapist has given me are straight out of Treat Your Own Neck, by Robin McKenzie — a book he recommends highly.

A news item from this week is a head scratcher: British Tourists Arrested in American Terror Charges. In their Twitter comments the couple joked that they were going to “destroy America” (British slang meaning party hard), and “dig up Marilyn Monroe” (a quote from the comedy Family Guy which is an American show).

For his Twitter jokes, Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. Both had their luggage searched for spades and shovels.

Lessons learned? Big Brother is watching and BB has absolutely no sense of humour (even American-grown humour). The couple were barred from entering the U.S.

On a positive note, I just received an Amazon delivery: Garner’s Modern American Usage. I’ve already enjoyed spending over an hour opening the book at random and reading the passages. For anyone who loves the English language and enjoys usage and grammar discussions, this book is highly recommended.

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: Book Review

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective, by Toby E. Huff. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 368p.

This work, by Toby E. Huff, is a perspective on the explosion of scientific knowledge in 17th Century Europe and England, and a probing look at why this happened in the West and not in China, India, or the Islamic states.

Using one invention in particular — the telescope — Huff documents how this instrument revolutionized the study of the heavens and how Galileo and others used it to explore the skies and make detailed observations that led to a confirmation of a heliocentric system posited by Copernicus. The paradigm shift away from a spherical, geocentric system electrified the science of the day.

Huff then traces the migration of the telescope into China, India and Islamic countries. In China Jesuit missionaries not only introduced the telescope, they also translated into Chinese the findings of Galileo and others. A few court astrologers (astronomers) were interested, but mainly to help refine the prediction of heavenly events. At the time, China held a flat-earth view of the cosmos and hadn’t even moved to a spherical, geocentric view. The new knowledge was not incorporated into Chinese study. Huff then traces parallel stories from India and the world of Islam.

And it wasn’t just in astronomy. Huff also traces the development and knowledge of forces and dynamics, and medical anatomy in the 17th Century and how in Europe scientists, from the 12th C onward, had been dissecting animals and human corpses, thereby learning about the interior anatomy of the body. Islamic faith considered dissection a form of desecration and it wasn’t allowed. Similar obstacles were in place in India and China.

Huff then postulates on the differences in culture between the West and the rest of the world. Europe and England had more or less autonomous universities and, due to the rise of Protestantism and its goal of having each person read the Bible personally, a steady rise in literacy. Literacy in the rest of the world was circumscribed and schools in China, India, and Islamic countries were mainly set up to teach traditional wisdom and religious law.

The West was living in a time of great intellectual curiosity and had had a tradition, based on Aristotle, of hands-on experimenting to discover the truths of things. Again, there was no corresponding climate in the rest of the world.

Huff’s work is academic, with copious footnotes and an extensive bibliography. He has, in no way, suggested the West was superior to the other cultures of the day, but that it was culturally different. China, India, and the Islamic states had access to the instruments developed in the West, and to the knowledge that was being discovered and disseminated, but their societies didn’t have the requisite intellectual curiosity to pursue the new knowledge.

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution is one of the best science books I’ve read in awhile. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of science and especially the emergence of science in the 17th Century and the culmination of many threads of knowledge in the publications of Newton.

More Trouble for Darwin

darwin-ape

When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he suspected it would cause a storm of protest and indignation from religious quarters. He was right. Evolutionary studies, along with the new geological studies of the 19th century, posited the first awareness of “deep time,” as Stephen Jay Gould would later call it. It hypothesized that the earth was older, incredibly older, than had been previously thought. The evidence, corroborated by scientists then and since, has supported the hypothesis and shown that The Bible of the Christian church isn’t a reliable guide to the history of the planet.

Worse, from a Victorian point of view, was the evidence that man, along with the great apes, had descended from a common ancestor, through a long process of natural selection. One measured in millions of years for our branch alone.

Darwin had a hard time of it publicly and was lampooned in the newspapers of the day. But, continued studies through the next 150 years plus a new understanding of genetics, has shown that, with minor exceptions, Darwin got it right. For this he is justly honored for being one of the great figures of science.

Among scientists of natural history, the theory of evolution fits the facts, full stop. Nothing scientific has ever been put forward to challenge this point of view, and the so-called “gaps” put forward by those who don’t want to believe the facts, have been closed one by one as more discoveries have been unearthed. The fossil record and the genetic record are both consistent with evolution having taken place in the deep time of the planet Earth. To most scientifically literate people, the theory of evolution is as solid as the theory of gravity.

But there are still those who resist facing the facts. While visiting a cave in Arkansas last spring, I innocently asked our guide how long it took for the magnificent large limestone formation to form. She replied, “It depends on whether you believe in the ‘millions’ theory or the ‘thousands’ theory of the earth. I’m in the ‘thousands’ camp so I’d say a few thousand years.”

The “thousands” theory? This derives from Bishop James Ussher in the 17th century who speculated that the date of the Biblical Creation could be dated by calculating the lifespans of Old Testament patriarchs. Ussher’s conclusion was that the earth began on October 23, 4004 B.C. This totally Biblical calculation has somehow survived into present times, within sects of fundamentalist Christians who believe therefore that the earth is some 6000 or so years old, despite scientific (and rather obvious) evidence to the contrary.

What people choose to believe as an article of faith, rather than reason, is a basic right in the Western world. There are people who believe in the efficacy of quartz crystals and “power spots” as well. The problem begins when beliefs such as these spill out from personal and congregational spaces into public spaces.

You’d think that 150 years of solid evidence for the evolution of life on our planet, including our own evolution into Homo sapiens, would be sufficient reason for having it taught in schools. Yet there are still fundamental Christian lobbyists who want it taught alongside something they call “intelligent design.” Judge John Jones III ruled in the Dover, Pa., case in 2002, that “intelligent design, by its very nature, is a religious belief, not a scientific fact or theory, and therefore should not be taught in schools.” Intelligent Design is a tarted up name for Creationism — an attempt to give it scientific trappings.

But the debate continues. A recent Washington Times article, “On teaching evolution: New year, old fight,” reports that “at least two U.S. states in 2012 will consider bills that downplay the notion man evolved from animals and call for Charles Darwin’s famous theory to be taught as just that – one possible explanation, not the definitive answer.” Alongside Intelligent Design, that is.

Rep. Gary Hopper of New Hampshire is quoted as saying, “I want the problems with current theories to be presented so that kids understand that science doesn’t really have all the answers. They are just guessing.”

Guessing? If this is any indication of how some people think science works, it’s clear that we need more, not less, teaching of science and scientific literacy. Certainly science doesn’t have all the answers. That’s the nature of science. A scientist, like a good detective, follows the evidence, wherever it leads. In fact science is based on challenging the evidence. Whenever a new study emerges, other scientists try to pick it apart. If it withstands the challenges and is replicated by other scientific studies, a consensus forms around the results. If, eventually, evidence points to something entirely different, then previous views are updated and a new consensus is arrived at. In brief, science is self-correcting.

Religious faith does not operate this way. It instead harbors the concept of “immutable” truths. Which is not to say that a scientist can’t be a religious person. It’s just that he or she doesn’t confuse the two “magisteria” as Stephen Jay Gould would call the different mental spaces of science and religion.

That we live in an age of science is indisputable. And the scientific consensus is that Darwin got it right. There are no evidence-based challenges to evolutionary theory, only faith-based ones. To become good, participating citizens of a scientific world, students need to be taught how science works and not have their publicly-funded science studies entangled with the religious beliefs of fundamentalist Christian (or, for that matter, Islamic) faith.

In a modern world, church and state must be kept separate. The teaching of science must be taught in the context of following the evidence, not of comparing it to religious beliefs. To do anything else would be a disservice to the students.

Taking Stock: Facing 2012

iPhone Selfie

I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year season!

Traditionally New Years Day is a time for resolutions that will largely be unkept in the months that follow, so I’ll refrain from making any. Besides some of them are ongoing no matter what time of year: lose weight, exercise more, write more.

Looking back to 2011, I’ve had a Macbook Air (11″) for a year now and it’s so slick and useful it still feels new. As such it’s an incentive to get down to the task of writing just so I can use it. I enjoy my technologies, but it’s been a long time since one has stayed so fresh. Kudos to Apple for another brilliant design and execution.

There are rumours of a new iPad in the works some time 2012. If it turns out to be true I might be ready to pick one up. I gave my previous one to Marion after getting the more writer-friendly Macbook Air, but I confess I miss the iPad experience. I get a miniature version of it with my iPhone 4 but it’s not the same without the large viewing screen.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a fan of podcasts and I’d like to pay tribute to my two favourites: I Should Be Writing, by Mur Lafferty, and Brain Science Podcast, by Dr. Ginger Campbell. You ladies have allowed me to listen in on hours of intelligent conversation. Thank you.

I have a couple of directions I may take my writing in 2012. One idea I’ve been kicking around is putting together a series of personal essays into a Kindle book. The other is to write on a couple of subjects that interest me, but as extended feature articles that could be published as Kindle Shorts.

I don’t have any special photo projects in mind for the year. I’m content to carry a camera around with me and take shots of this and that as I see things. I plan to post a new photo on my Flickr photostream every day, if possible. The camera in my iPhone 4 increases my odds of meeting this goal.

One of the things I may do more of in 2012 is post short reviews of books I’ve read. My current reading is Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution, by Toby E. Huff. I’m about 25% into it and already it’s shaping up as the best science book I’ve read in the past year.

Currently listening to The Harrow & The Harvest, by Gillian Welch. Indispensable if you like a traditional folk sound.

My other two goals for the New Year are to study more philosophy and mathematics. I’m nearly ready to tackle my Algebra II course and I have a good Teaching Company Great Lectures course Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida that I’ve started. Staying intellectually active is less a goal than a deep-seated need. I suspect it’s the same for you.

I look forward to seeing and hearing from friends in 2012. May your 2012 be a wonderful year.