Thursday, December 31, 2015
I had not heard of NASA's Michelle Thaller until this week. (revised to remove typos)
I turned on CSPAN Sunday morning in 2015 in the middle of a Discussion on Science Skeptics. It was a rerun from earlier in the year.
A member of the audience addressed the panel. He related his experience with people who sought out medical science when a family member had spinal meningitis but would not vaccinate against the same disease. Then said, "We are all mortal. What is it about death that brings us back to science?"
More than one on the panel blurted out, before clicking their microphones to on, the one-word answer. Fear.
While panel member, Richard Alley, spoke analytically about the relative costs of ignoring science in different situations, I thought scientific-atheists might turn to religion when fearing death.
Then a young woman, Michelle Thaller, turned on her microphone. She said she was also scheduled for another panel, one on science and religion, and declared that it was not her area of expertise and that there was little intersection between them. I'll quote the rest of her answer.
Michelle Thaller:
One of the things that people do not understand about science, being a scientist, is that we do not believe we have found truth. As amazing as the equations of Albert Einstein are, and I have studied graduate-level Quantum Mechanics and graduate level General Relativity, we cannot find one small deviation from these laws that were set up 100 years ago. When you measure how light bends around a black hole or around the sun, Einstein is absolutely correct but we know it is not the be all end all truth. Einstein's theories don't work inside an atom. There the laws of quantum mechanics contradict them. When you ara a scientist, you give up this idea of there ever being an answer and of there ever being a truth. ... and that does, of course, influence my view on spirituality.
I live in a world where you learn to swim in doubt - beautiful, complex, ever-increasingly accurate , getting towards the truth but never getting there. There is a beauty in trying to lose your ego in that. ... and I think people often think that scientists don't respond emotionally to what they learn from science. ... I don't think that's true. Uhmmm ... This is still conjectural but we are fairly sure that time does not exist the way we think it does. It is not a simple progression from start to end. The modern laws of physics and particle physics almost require that to not be true. and ... In some other dimensional view, you can see all of my life from beginning to end. Because we believe the big bang most likely created all of time as well as all of space. and at that instant of creation, not only was space created, but time from start to end, whatever that means to temporally based creatures like me. So I say to my husband some times because we expect to die and not have anything after death, that when the universe began, I was holding your hand and when the universe ends I'll be holding your hand
there is anther way to be an swim in doubt and still find beauty.
Me: DROP THE MIC!
I turned on CSPAN Sunday morning in 2015 in the middle of a Discussion on Science Skeptics. It was a rerun from earlier in the year.
A member of the audience addressed the panel. He related his experience with people who sought out medical science when a family member had spinal meningitis but would not vaccinate against the same disease. Then said, "We are all mortal. What is it about death that brings us back to science?"
More than one on the panel blurted out, before clicking their microphones to on, the one-word answer. Fear.
While panel member, Richard Alley, spoke analytically about the relative costs of ignoring science in different situations, I thought scientific-atheists might turn to religion when fearing death.
Then a young woman, Michelle Thaller, turned on her microphone. She said she was also scheduled for another panel, one on science and religion, and declared that it was not her area of expertise and that there was little intersection between them. I'll quote the rest of her answer.
Michelle Thaller:One of the things that people do not understand about science, being a scientist, is that we do not believe we have found truth. As amazing as the equations of Albert Einstein are, and I have studied graduate-level Quantum Mechanics and graduate level General Relativity, we cannot find one small deviation from these laws that were set up 100 years ago. When you measure how light bends around a black hole or around the sun, Einstein is absolutely correct but we know it is not the be all end all truth. Einstein's theories don't work inside an atom. There the laws of quantum mechanics contradict them. When you ara a scientist, you give up this idea of there ever being an answer and of there ever being a truth. ... and that does, of course, influence my view on spirituality.
I live in a world where you learn to swim in doubt - beautiful, complex, ever-increasingly accurate , getting towards the truth but never getting there. There is a beauty in trying to lose your ego in that. ... and I think people often think that scientists don't respond emotionally to what they learn from science. ... I don't think that's true. Uhmmm ... This is still conjectural but we are fairly sure that time does not exist the way we think it does. It is not a simple progression from start to end. The modern laws of physics and particle physics almost require that to not be true. and ... In some other dimensional view, you can see all of my life from beginning to end. Because we believe the big bang most likely created all of time as well as all of space. and at that instant of creation, not only was space created, but time from start to end, whatever that means to temporally based creatures like me. So I say to my husband some times because we expect to die and not have anything after death, that when the universe began, I was holding your hand and when the universe ends I'll be holding your hand
there is anther way to be an swim in doubt and still find beauty.
Me: DROP THE MIC!
