“The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original…” –\u00a0David Brin, Brightness Reef<\/p>\n
People don\u2019t understand science.<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t mean that your average person doesn\u2019t understand how relativity works, or quantum mechanics, or biochemistry. Like any advanced study, it\u2019s hard to understand them, and it takes a lifetime of work to become familiar with them.<\/p>\n
No, what I mean is that people don\u2019t understand the\u00a0process\u00a0of science. How a scientist goes from a list of observations and perhaps a handful of equations to understanding. To\u00a0knowing.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s a shame, because it\u2019s a beautiful thing. It\u2019s not mechanical, not wholly logical, and not plodding down a narrow path of rules and laws.<\/p>\n
But it appears to me that this is how Douglas Todd, author of an article in the Vancouver Sun called\u00a0\u2018Scientism\u2019 infects Darwinian debates: An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology, thinks of science. He likens it to religion, an unflinching belief that science can explain everything. He calls this – as many have before him – scientisim:<\/p>\n
Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.<\/p>\n
Those who unknowingly fall into the trap of scientism act as if hard science is the only way of knowing reality. If something can\u2019t be “proved” through the scientific method, through observable and measurable evidence, they say it\u2019s irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Scientism is terribly limiting of human understanding. It leaves little or no place for the insights of the arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, mythology, dreams, music, the emotions or spirituality.<\/p>\n
Right from the gate he\u2019s using a straw-man argument. There are many things science can\u2019t explain\u00a0currently, and no real scientist brushes those fields off as “irrelevant”. And he\u2019s wrong in saying that science leaves no room for all those other studies; it\u2019s our study of human evolution that bring fantastic insight into why we have art, dreams, and mythology in the first place. What a strange notion, that science plays no role in those fields or our understanding of them!<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s in his understanding of science where Todd goes completely off course. What he says about science is\u00a0exactly backwards, and it seems to me that he doesn\u2019t understand the process of science, of how it\u2019s done by real scientists in real life.<\/p>\n
First off, there is no such thing as\u00a0scientism. What he is describing is simply\u00a0science, because science by its very nature is an attempt to explain all things using natural processes. And he seems to think science has no imagination.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s insane. Without imagination, all we can do is categorize the world. Assigning names and numbers, statistics and categories. And while that sort of thing is important in the scientific process,\u00a0it\u2019s not science itself. Without imagination, science is a dictionary.<\/p>\n
And in fact the opposite of what Todd is saying is true. It takes no imagination at all to insert a supernatural explanation in some spot where you don\u2019t understand the process. It\u2019s all too easy to say “the bacterium flagellum could not have evolved,” or “The Big Bang theory doesn\u2019t explain why the Universe is homogeneous everywhere,” and therefore “God did it.” But it takes imagination, soaring, incredible, wonderful imagination, to look beyond the limitations of what\u2019s currently known, and see what could possibly be\u2026 and even more imagination to make sure this venturing beyond current understanding\u00a0still stays within the bound of reason and known rules of science.<\/p>\n
You can always insert magic or belief or some supernatural power, but in the end that is a trap. Because someone else who is more imaginative than you will see the actual steps, the process reality made, and then you are left with an ever-narrowing amount of supernatural room in which to wiggle. And once that gap starts to narrow, the squeeze is inevitable. Your explanation will be forced to fill zero volume, and you\u2019re done. Your explanation will be shown to be wrong for everyone to see, and your only recourse will be to abandon it, far too late to save your credibility.<\/p>\n
Or to run for the Texas State Board of Education. But that\u2019s certainly not science.<\/p>\n
It took a vast leap of imagination for Max Planck to think of gas molecules in the Sun to behave like little springs, oscillating away, able to eject only specific colors of light. It took a leap of imagination for Alan Guth to think that the Big Bang theory wasn\u2019t wrong, but incomplete, and to add inflation to explain why the Universe looks so smooth. It took Darwin\u2019s breadth of imagination to correlate the vast amount of data he collected, and see that it was the unthinking mind of nature that forced species to adapt or die.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all too easy to “pooh-pooh” science, and to say that scientists are black and white automatons who go through the motions of the scientific method, rejecting anything with sparkle or color or surprise. But that conclusion itself lacks imagination. Science is full of wonder, of surprise, of leaps of imagination. If it were anything else, we wouldn\u2019t have probes orbiting other worlds, we wouldn\u2019t have vaccinations capable of wiping out scourges like smallpox, we wouldn\u2019t have digital cameras, the Internet, ever-faster computers, cars, planes, televisions. We wouldn\u2019t be able to feed ourselves, support our population, or look ahead to see where our decisions are taking us\u2026 and to see if these decisions are the right ones, and what to do to make them better.<\/p>\n
Without imagination, even after all these centuries, we\u2019d have learned nothing.<\/p>\n
Science\u00a0is\u00a0imagination.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0[Tip o\u2019 the lab coat to Bill Rehm.]<\/p>\n
By\u00a0Phil Plait “The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original…” –\u00a0David Brin, Brightness Reef People don\u2019t understand science. And I don\u2019t mean that your average person doesn\u2019t understand how relativity works, or quantum mechanics, or biochemistry. Like any advanced study, it\u2019s hard to understand them, and it takes a lifetime […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-research-center-guest-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":650,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\naka The Bad Astronomer
\nhttp:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy<\/a>
\nthebadastronomer@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"