I just want to thank Dale McGowan for pointing me to the Radiolab podcast.
Deena and I are slowly working our way through the archived episodes – this is the most acoustically delicious learning experience I can remember having. I recommend it to anyone with a mote of curiosity about stuff in general.
So far we’ve learned about randomness, race, sperm, the placebo effect, zoos, mortality, and time; and we’ve also been treated to a fascinating investigation of the 1938 “War of the Worlds” panic.
Over at Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse has shared yet another of his symphonically beautiful bits of writing. This one is in honour of his grandmother, who recently died. He calls it “Green Fields“. Check it out. Here’s a taster:
For those who are grieving, for those who mourn, and for all those who are burdened with the weary weight of sorrow, I have a prescription.
Find a quiet, peaceful place, a green field of grass where great trees grow and gift the world with their shade. Let it be just before sunset, at that golden hour when the heat of the afternoon is past, when the sky is blue as a pearl and the setting sun hues the world in its last, richest and most transitory light.
Sit against the trunk of an old and massive tree, one that’s lived through summers and winters untold. Lean on its rough, moss-clad bark and feel the slow, patient pulse of the life in the green heart of the wood. Try to clear your mind of thought, and listen.
(Read the rest at Daylight Atheism.)
Photo credit:
Crepuscular ray sunset from Telstra tower, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
How many times has someone has asked you, as a non-believer (whatever it happens to be that you don’t believe in), “Don’t you believe in anything greater than yourself?” For me, the question most often comes up when I declare a naturalistic worldview. No god? No afterlife? Then what do you look to for hope and inspiration?
Today, I’m just going to offer a couple of items on one source of inspiration and hope from something greater than myself: the cosmos.
Even as a simple empirical matter, there are worlds beyond count, many grander than our own in their different ways. The image to the right is one example – click on it, enlarge it, try to get your head around the vast grandeur of everything that lies outside our little planetary cocoon (a cocoon that is itself much vaster and more beautiful than anything I or any human can claim credit for).
Or try this simple image. Some of you will recognize it. Some will know the phrase often associated with it: the Pale Blue Dot.
This is the last image of Earth taken by the Voyager probe, as it passed Saturn on its journey out of the Solar System.
Do I believe in anything greater than myself? Yes. In my boldest moments, I try to go beyond simply accepting the facts of astronomy as told in numbers. I try to take into the very centre of my self the understanding given by astronomers and scientists. To grasp the enormity of everything that exists, and to accept my humble place in this reality.
It is a difficult task for my limited, pragmatic ape brain. But I have the help of some great poet-scientists of yesterday and today. Here’s one of them, Carl Sagan – the man we can thank for the Pale Blue Dot image – contemplating its meaning for us who live on that dot:
Photo credits:
Pale Blue Dot – public domain, created by NASA. Via Wikimedia.
If you’re ever feeling down and in need of an uplifting thought, try this science-inspired contemplation. It occurred to me yesterday as I was seeking consolation after a rather acute disappointment.
The Earth’s gravity pulls on us to the tune of almost 10 m/s/s. In other words, if it were unopposed, every second it would accelerate us downwards 10 metres per second faster. But fortunately, we have a very supportive ground to keep us up. Remember Newton’s third law of motion? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So that 10 m/s/s downward pull is counteracted by a 10 m/s/s supportive force holding us up.*
Now, imagine we had that 10 m/s/s support out in space, where there was no gravity to counteract it. How fast would you go?
Well, the speed of light is just shy of 300 million metres per second, so after 30 million seconds, one gravity of acceleration would get you to the speed of light.
And how long is 30 million seconds, you ask?
Just shy of a year: 353 days.
Think about that. Every year, the ground under you supports you with enough force to get you to the speed of light.
* For the pedants in my audience, yes, I know that force and acceleration are two different things. But for the purpose of this contemplation, the differences are immaterial, and to pedantically point them out would distract from the point of the contemplation.
Photo credits:
Earth photo from the Great Expectations blog, probably public domain.
I commute by bicycle to work here in Edinburgh. It’s an okay city for cycling. One of my biggest peeves is other cyclists who ignore the traffic rules, encouraging motorists to think that all cyclists are dangerous lunatics.
Well, Erich at Dangerous Intersection has just introduced me to a dangerous lunatic cyclist in this fair city whose antics are simply inspiring. Take a look:
(But notice that he’s wearing a helmet.)
Postscript: I queued this post up several days in advance. Since then, the video has become quite well-known, and been picked up by media outlets that get more circulation than this blog. So apologies if this is old news to you.
A rainbow is a beautiful sight.
Rainbows have inspired people for ages, spawning many myths and poems.
There are those who think that knowledge of how a rainbow works somehow destroys that beauty. Here are some lines from Keats’ poem, “Lamia”, lamenting Newton’s insights into optics that let us see inside the workings of the rainbow:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—-
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
I can almost understand his sorrow – mystery is beautiful, and when knowledge expands, mystery seems to retreat.
But what a narrow view of the world, to think that more knowledge, more understanding, somehow robs the world of its mystery and its beauty. Let me relate a personal account.
It begins with a book, whose name is taken from the passage above. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins shows not only the glory and delight of discovery that lies at the root of scientific pursuits. He gives us a glimpse of the deeper beauty revealed by those pursuits.
He reminds us (for example) that Newton’s work on optics has been carried on. We now know that visible light – spanning the colours of the rainbow – is but a tiny slice of a great continuum. The electromagnetic spectrum extends off the red end of the rainbow into infrared and radio waves. Off the other end, we get ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma waves.
The rainbow we see is only a fragment – the tiny slice of that greater spectrum, visible to our pragmatically-evolved eyes.
I was on a train, some weeks after reading Dawkins’ thoughts. Looking out the window, I saw a rainbow, gliding along the nearby hills, keeping pace with us. It was soft and faint, as beautiful as the first rainbow I ever saw as a child.
But this time there was something more. As I stared at it, I thought of it not simply as a strip of colours, but as something greater and deeper – the full spectrum of light. Of course, I still didn’t see those other colours. Knowledge had not altered my eyes at all. But it was as if I could almost feel them.
Like when you hear a loved one walk up behind you. All that you physically sense is the sound. But you know what they look like, how they walk, how they stand. How tall they are. How likely they are to tickle you if they get close enough. With the sound of their steps and their breathing, your mind calls up all of this knowledge, filling in the experience for you so that you can almost see the person behind you, almost feel their movements and expressions.
In just that way, I felt the invisible rainbow filling the sky outside my train – down to the centre of the arc and out as far as the sky went. It was magnificent. Such glory; such encompassing beauty.
Beauty that I would never have known if the rainbow had not been “unwoven”.
Thankyou, Richard Dawkins, for helping me to see this. Thankyou to every scientist who gives us the chance to see the unseen, hear the unheard, touch the untouchable.
We are, and forever will be, surrounded by a sea of mystery. What delight to be able to reach into it, to see the wondrous glory that is only accessible by the tools of science – Keats’ “cold philosophy”. Cold? The thought of all the knowledge, all the enrichment of subjective experience that science can give us, warms my very being.
I wish I could show Keats the rainbow I now see, thanks to scientists like Newton. But I’ll have to content myself by sharing it with you. May you feel the same exhilaration I feel at the sight of every rainbow!
Photo credits:
The rainbow images are from the Wikipedia article on rainbows. The first is public domain; the second is licenced under an Attribution ShareAlike Creative Commons licence by its creator, Eric Rolph.
The spectrum illustration is from the Wikipedia article on the electromagnetic spectrum. It is licenced under an Attribution ShareAlike Creative Commons licence by its creator, Tatoute.
Among the blogs I follow is one by a Unitarian: Free and Responsible Search. Last week, Doug posted a story that he related at the Valentine’s Day service in his church, that really nails why I love the UUs. Here’s a teaser:
When Lucy Stone was a little girl, she decided that she was never, ever, ever going to get married.
She had a pretty good reason for making that decision, because she was living back in the 1800s. And in those days, when a man and a woman got married, the man became the boss. It said so right in the law. So if a woman owned some property, well, when she got married it wasn’t her property any more; it was her husband’s property. And if she had a job and made a little money – it wasn’t her money, it was her husband’s money. Because he was the boss.
Lucy didn’t want to have a boss, so one day she announced to her mother that she was never, ever, ever going to get married. And her mother said something that parents say a lot. I know I heard it from my parents and maybe you’ve heard it from yours. Her mother said: “When you get older, you’ll change your mind.”
Read the rest to learn why I wouldn’t mind at all if Kaia were to grow up among this particular religious community.
From Primo Levi’s afterword to the combined volume of If This is a Man and The Truce, which relate the author’s experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz and on his journey home.
It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders; we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their splendor or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion, and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.
The fall equinox occurs today at 15:44. As the sun sits in balance, straight above the equator, I give you a post about balance, about thinking of the other side. About including others with you and including yourself with others.
Derek at Disonanz Cognitif has a post that just begs to become a blog meme. (Thanks to Mike Clawson at Friendly Atheist for pointing me to Derek’s post.) Here are three of his “I am” statements (go read his blog for the rest):
I live in a world of people, animals, places, things, ideas, time, space, matter, energy, forces, galaxies, quasars, mesons, and bosons. I live in a universe that seems self-sustaining and acts a whole lot like there’s no God in it. I am an Atheist.I believe I have not yet sufficiently investigated the myriad of religious, spiritual experiences others claim to have had, and that there are too many well-educated, intelligent people who claim religious belief without a hint of shame, to discount the existence of an otherworld completely. I am an Agnostic.
I believe the teachings of Christ regarding positive social change and mercy to the oppressed are just a bit too clear a message of the gospel to be swept up as a minor sub-plot to securing an eternal country club membership for oneself. I am a Christian.
Derek explicitly avoids labelling himself in general (at the end of his post, he says “I am a person who has made a conscious choice to make no overt profession of faith or disbelief”), so it’s quite a bold thing for him to make such a list as this. If you read through the comments on the Friendly Atheist post, you can see that some people don’t even try to take the statements in the spirit they’re intended. It seems obvious to me that Derek is trying to point out bridges. Some commenters just want to nitpick and try to impose their own definitions of terms on Derek.
Going through his list, I could echo “me too” to every one of his declarations. More importantly, I think this is a great way to crack through some of the divisive oppositions in our society, if people can bother to listen.
And I think I could add a couple of entries to the list myself. Here goes …
I delight in solving puzzles and probing mysteries. I love to discover things which can be discovered and to know things which can be known. I am determined to learn about the reality that lies beyond my subjective, biased human perceptions. I am a scientist.
I savour the taste of a good, unsolved mystery. I enjoy the potential that lies in the unknown. I could lie for hours looking up at the sky, contemplating the fact that I will never know most of what there is to be known in the universe. I am a mystic.
I refuse to let people’s reproductive anatomy dictate how I treat them, except when I expect to interact directly with their reproductive anatomy. I resist sexist behaviour in myself and in others. I am a feminist.
I value the lives of all sentient animals, and cause them as little suffering as possible. I enjoy a variety of foods, but do my best to eat things whose production does not involve the deaths of feeling beings. I am a vegetarian.
I think the best hope for human well-being and betterment lies in treating one another with compassion and reason in this life, the only one we can be sure we have. I value human life above non-human life. I am a humanist.
So there it is. I invite you to add your own items, either in the comments here or, of course, on your own blog.
I know that many people will disagree with the connections I’m making between characteristics and labels. But remember, this is an exercise in seeking connections. There may be an element of exaggeration in some or all of the items, but there is also an element of truth. It is that truth, that seed of inclusiveness, of universality, that is (in my mind) the point of the whole exercise.
I think I’ll close this post as Derek closes his, with a line of hope and openness.
“And yet, the spiritual journey continues.”
How does the humanist outlook on life affect one's thoughts and actions? I share my own perspective on life's puzzles and the events this life throws at me, as I explore the personal implications of this noble and ancient approach to life.
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