The recent, long-overdue death of Jerry Falwell reminded me of how worthless are the contributions of the religious right to our national discourse. If you're kicking around any of the important issues facing our society today and hoping to grope toward deeper understanding and enlightened public policy, you can be certain to hear utter rubbish from TV evangelicals.The dots were further connected last night when we attended a very engrossing and entertaining lecture on the nature of the Universe at the SB Museum of Natural History. The real attraction that got us out of the house on a week night was not the subject matter, but rather the speaker--Professor Alex Filippenko from the astronomy department at Cal. Berkeley. We knew Alex when he was a high school student at Dos Pueblos, and Jan was one of his favorite instructors, but last night we were on the other side of the lectern, sitting in a crowd of a few hundred scientists and amateur astronomers, hoping to glean a few bits of cutting-edge cosmology from the words of the master.
Alex is eminent both for his brilliant research and scholarship--documented, his Web site says, in about 500 published papers--but also for his ebullient and effective teaching. He is not only one of the world's most highly cited astronomers, but Berkeley undergrads have voted him the "Best Professor" on campus five times. In 2006, he was selected as the Carnegie/CASE Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. His specialty is supernovae and the expansion of the Universe.
There was a lot of mathematical and scientific explanation that--even put in layman's terms--went way over our heads, but we did come away with the some pretty interesting basic information about the cosmos: The Universe has been with us for about 13.7 billion years. After the Big Bang the Universe expanded very rapidly, but as would be expected by the laws of physics, the rate of expansion slowed down over time. Then at some point about 9 billion years back, something curious happened--the rate of expansion started picking up speed. We know this by clocking the exploding stars (supernovae) in distant galaxies. The mechanism of this perplexing behavior is theorized to be an abundance of a weird anti-gravitational force that astronomers have come to call "dark energy." Existence as we know it here on earth--even as we know it in our entire solar system--is governed predominantly by gravity, but in the Universe as a whole--comprising billions upon billions of galaxies much larger than our own Milky Way--dark energy calls the tune. Alex says that 73% of the Universe is dark energy, 23% is "dark matter" (Don't ask! I thought THAT was cutting edge.), and only 4% is atoms.
So here we are trying to get our minds around the nature of existence...the cosmos..."all there is," as Alex puts it, and most of what we thought we knew just ain't so. Everything we see, touch, or taste is made of atoms. Everything we know about on or around this planet has an atomic structure. Everything we can imagine out in the deepest corners of outer space is still atomic in nature--except for the vast expanses of vacuum, which are apparently packed with anti-matter and anti-gravity. What we know and almost understand is only 4% of the Universe. This other stuff that we can only postulate through mathematics and verify with indirect observation of its powers accounts for the other 96% of "all there is."
Okay, I can accept my humble status in the cosmos. But here's where I lose patience with the Bible thumpers. The guy sitting next to me in Fleischman Auditorium has fallen asleep in the middle of this brilliant lecture. While Alex has the rest of us totally rapt by the power of supernovae and the mystery of dark energy, this fellow next to me is literally snoring away the evening. People around me are looking at him and, I'm sure, wondering why someone would come to this event, pay his $10 and then sleep through these slides, the foam balls on the expanding cord, and the apple that Alex keeps tossing upward and catching as it falls earthward, a slave to gravity--unlike all those stars billions of light-years away.
But despite the intrinsic excitement of the lesson, this guy sleeps and snores through class. Then it's time for Q&A. And, sure enough, this guy wakes up and asks his question. It's an inarticulate jumble, but the essence of it is this: how do you square what you've been talking about with the Book of Genesis? How does the Bible fit in here?
Alex is a practiced public speaker and he accepted the question with equanimity and offered a logical answer that indicated that he and all other serious scientists have no trouble separating religious faith from scientific investigation. But it was a more rational and polite response than the moron deserved. These people are as poisonous to the pursuit of knowledge as they are destructive to rational political dialogue. Their contribution to mankind's progress is what I'd call "anti-knowledge." Man's progress has always had to struggle against this enormous force of ignorance and inattention.
And if we are unable to strangle this tendency we'll be headed for the Dark Ages. Right now the rate of descent in that direction seems to be accelerating.
