Fire and Knowledge

Many a man, brought up in the glib professional of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 81.

When the priests themselves ceased to believe in their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers.

Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples of his telescopes.

Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of micro-organisms; so they gaped as foolishly as at the millions of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices were offered. They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible and omniscient.

Thus our discoveries, instead of increasing our wisdom, only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had.

–The Elderly Gentleman in Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Oxford University Press: Revised edition, 1947), p. 147

Maybe you’ve heard: astronomers have discovered a new planet (Gliese 581c) 20 light years away that they speculate is similar to Earth. In one popular article, the summary states:

It’s got the same climate as Earth, plus water and gravity. A newly discovered planet is the most stunning evidence that life - just like us - might be out there.

That summary is completely misleading. Why?

1. We haven’t actually seen the planet. Astronomers calculated that the planet is probably there by its gravitational effects. But they haven’t actually seen it. That means we don’t know very much about the planet and calling it “new earth” is, as Treebeard might say, a little hasty.
2. We have no idea if there is water on it. They said “plus water” like we know it has water. We don’t.
3. We have no idea if it’s “the same climate as earth.” We do not know what kind of atmosphere it has or whether it has oxygen. We don’t even know if the temperature is similar. The type of atmosphere it has will have a large impact on temperature.
4. They say it is “the most stunning evidence that life - just like us - might be out there.” How is this “stunning evidence”? We don’t know if there is any life on it. And if there is, it is doubtful it will be anything like us (for one, the gravity is probably twice as strong which means it would result in very different lifeforms).
5. This doesn’t increase the odds of Earth-like planets. The article says “the real importance is not so much the discovery of this planet itself, but the fact that it shows that Earth-like planets are probably extremely common in the Universe.” There’s at least two problems with that sentence:
1. If the real importance is not the planet itself, why is so much attention being put on it? Why isn’t the emphasis on the new probability of Earth-like planets? Without knowing more about this planet, we don’t know if the probability of Earth-like planets is higher, because we don’t know if this is an Earth-like planet yet!
2. Saying this increases the odds of Earth-like planets is like a blindfolded person selecting a marble out of a jar, suspecting the marble might be blue (but not really knowing), thus leading him to the conclusion that the odds of blue marbles in the jar has increased.

All that to say, beware ye of article summaries.

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 245

Can we actually “know” the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.

–Woody Allen, Getting Even (1971) in The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, 170

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.

–J.B.S. Haldane in Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 16.

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved. Excerpt:

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works….

Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon….

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years.

[Nicolaus Copernicus is] an upstart astrologer…. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.

–Martin Luther (attributed), as quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers (1983), p. 302