Tag Archives: faith

It’s extraordinary to make discoveries about the universe…

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This week’s guest post features an interview with Michael Brooks. As well as holding a PhD in quantum physics, Michael is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He’s a consultant to New Scientist, has a weekly column for the New Statesman, and is the author of the bestseller in non-fiction titled ‘13 Things That Don’t Make Sense’. As part of an ongoing cycle of lectures, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, together with the British Council, recently invited Michael Brooks, to explain the simple question of the origins of the universe.

Nicolas Jackson, from North by Southwest, a partnership between National Radio of Spain (RNE) and the British Council, caught up with Michael Brooks on the occasion.

For a quick taster, here are a few snippets from Michael’s interview, but you can listen to the full interview in the podcast at the end of the post.

Q When did humans first begin to take an interest in discovering the origins of the universe?

Michael Brooks It’s a really interesting phenomenon that today, in 2011, we think of there being an origin to the universe or a beginning, because actually that’s a relatively new idea. It wasn’t really put out there till the 1920s by a Belgian catholic priest called Georges Lemaître. He came up with this idea of a day without yesterday, and there was a kind of firestorm, fireworks and suddenly, what he called the primeval atom, kind of exploded… and from this came the universe.

And… he kind of put this out in the late 1920s, and when Einstein heard about it in 1933, he said: “This is the most beautiful idea I’ve ever heard of”. In the meantime Edwin Hubble, the astronomer, had been gathering data that showed that most of the galaxies that surround us are moving away from us very fast, and if you wind that back, that implies that somehow they were all together in one place at the same time, which we would consider to be the beginning of the universe.

This seems like a common-sense idea to us now, actually it wasn’t accepted until the 1960s; it did 30 years in the cold and there were various debates over whether the universe had always existed. You couldn’t say anything about a beginning until we discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was the echo of the Big Bang, and proved that there was some kind of cosmic explosion, like Lemaître had said. And that was the point at which we just dropped the idea of there being a steady state, always existing universe, and decided that there had to have been a beginning of everything.

Q Might the idea of the origins of the universe be challenging for certain religious sects in the same way that Darwin’s Origin of the Species has been?

Michael Brooks It’s very important to realise that scientists aren’t deliberately undermining people of faith and religious ideas. What they are doing is looking out into the cosmos and finding evidence for this and for that, and with that evidence we adjust our ideas – of course with Galileo we adjusted our ideas about whether the earth was at the centre of the universe. Based on the evidence we had to change that to having the sun as the centre of the solar system and the earth spinning around it.

Now, there is some backlash against this, particularly in the United States, where people want to only deal in terms of what their faith tells them to believe, or what their religious leaders tell them to believe. Science is no respecter of that really, in many ways, science comes in and says, “this is just what the evidence says, and this is what our experiments tell us,” or, “this is what we uncover in the fossil record.” I don’t think there is a deliberate attempt to create trouble; it’s certainly not an attempt to undermine some of the other benefits of faith communities and everything else. I think it’s just that there are historically always areas where science just treads on the toes of people who hold religious faiths, and whereas science doesn’t really kind of pull any punches, the religious people, the religious leaders have to bend and accommodate the new scientific understanding. So this is always going to happen, I think.

Q Scientific discovery is obviously accelerated massively in the last hundred years. How much more is there for mankind to discover?

Michael Brooks Science is actually very humble in a sense, in that we’ve had 400 years of discovery, and cosmology has uncovered the history of the universe – 13.7 billion years old. But at the same time we realise how little we know, and we’ve discovered that 96% of the universe is in some form that we don’t understand, 72% is dark energy, a mysterious force that seems to be pushing on the very fabric of the universe, and 24% is dark matter, the stuff that exists out there, we know it must be there, or we think it must be there, or our calculations say it must be there. And we then have to work out what it is and look for it, and we’ve actually been looking for it properly for about 40 years now and still not found any clue about where it might be, or what kind of particles these might be.

So it keeps us humble, in a sense inside, and that’s one of the great things, [that] for every discovery that we make, there seem to be about ten more unanswered questions coming. And I think that’s one of the beauties of science, that it never seems to end, it seems to provoke more and more curiosity and questions.

Q You and the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia coincide in their desire to bring science closer to ordinary people and to make it accessible. Many people might see this as the exact opposite of the arts, where great art is not always meant to explain itself. Why is this?

Michael Brooks I think science takes the trouble because some of the concepts that we deal in are so abstract and so difficult to grasp. You can look at a painting and appreciate a painting without really knowing an awful lot about who painted it, or why, or what they were trying to get across, and you get this aesthetic beauty. Whereas some of the aesthetic beauty in science lies in very complicated equations, or in complicated ideas about, for instance, the beginning of the universe.

And so scientists are really taking it upon themselves to explain. And also there is a passion as well, about what we’ve discovered. It’s an extraordinary thing to be able to discover these things about the universe and how they work. So it’s very rewarding in and of itself to actually explain these to people and see their faces light up.

So maybe some of the arts, certainly painting and writing, people can take it in at whatever level they want to take it in at. So they don’t need so much kind of advocacy, they don’t need so much explanation and communication, whereas science is actually quite inaccessible until somebody is there acting as a bridge between the scientific community and the general public.

Podcast

North by Southwest 50 – Michael Brooks at The City of Arts and Sciences by British Council

North by Southwest is an English-language radio programme giving a taste of British and international culture and arts in Spain and also explores social, scientific and educational issues. North By Southwest is broadcast every week on RNE’s Radio Exterior (World Service) as part of its English-language programming.

Belief in Dialogue: Science, Culture and Modernity

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fern.JPG Dr Fern Elsdon-Baker is Director of the British Council’s Belief in Dialogue Programme. Belief in Dialogue is a new intercultural programme, which explores how people in the UK and internationally can live peacefully with diversity and difference in an increasingly pluralistic world. Fern currently serves on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Science in Culture Advisory Group. A passionate believer in the interactive communication of science, history and philosophy, in her spare time she is the recorder for the History of Science section for the British Science Association. She also serves on the programme’s committee for the British Society for the History of Science.

This blog post is coming to you from the United Arab Emirates. I am at a British Council conference organised with the American University of Sharjah, in association with the International Society for Science and Religion. The title of the conference, Belief in Dialogue: Science, Culture and Modernity, may at first seem a little challenging to some regular readers of Nature. How can there possibly be a dialogue of this kind?

One of the key questions we will be asking at the conference is what factors need to be in place in any society or culture for scientific endeavour or inquiry to flourish. At first these might seem like quite simplistic questions – surely it’s just about good science education and funding for scientific research institutions? However, I would argue it takes much more than that to build a thriving scientific economy. There are certain building blocks needed in areas of society that we might not readily recognise.

The role technological and medical advances can play in our daily lives is clear. We are all aware where the ethical boundaries may lie, whether this be around a range of questions from stem cell research, reproductive technologies, climate change through to water security.

However, to get to the root of what makes science flourish we need to make one fundamental observation – what we mean when we use the terms ‘science’, ‘technology’ or ‘medicine’ are all different. Intrinsically intertwined with shared – yet in places divergent – historical contexts, they have different approaches to methodology or their philosophical underpinning.

For technology to flourish you do not necessarily need a flourishing ‘scientific’ culture – significant societal drivers such as industry and entrepreneurship play perhaps a bigger role than a purely ‘scientific’ approach. Scientific inquiry is as much a way of thinking, seeing and asking questions about the world around us, as it is a consensus on a type of agreed methodological approach.

‘Science’ in this way, whether we recognise it or not, is an integral part of our daily lives. It is the very fabric of our cultural context but in different ways. I am far from arguing that there is no hope of an ‘objective science’ in the way that many scientists would argue – I am certainly not suggesting that the very stuff of science is culturally relative. But the cradle of all scientific inquiry is the broader societal and cultural context in which it sits. Not just the cultural perspective of the individual or team of researchers, but the context of the political system which supports or suppresses, the funding stream that can inadvertently create fashions and trends, and those of us in wider society who are ultimately the end users of any research and in turn fuel both political and funding priorities. This rich tapestry of influences ultimately shapes the scientific discourse of the day.

The answer then to my question lies outside of the science faculty or classroom. It is becoming increasingly recognised in developing scientific economies that the humanities play a key part in helping to frame the systems of thinking that are needed to engage both critically and analytically with the world around us. In the UK, we have long recognised the role of strong multidisciplinary discourse and it is to our credit that our research funding councils see the critical value in this interplay between sciences and humanities – even in these difficult economic times.

Another factor that we are growing to value more and more is the open engagement with wider society and cultures in science communication. Gone are the days when we would expect to disseminate ‘knowledge’ to an uninformed and apparently wilfully ignorant public. We are all members of that amorphous mass we like to call public and we cannot assume that we are all uninformed, uninterested or do not have valid questions about the role of science in society today or how it relates to our own individual cultural perspectives.

Freedom of thought and expression play a key role here too. Too often fundamentalists at the extremes of the spectrum close down on other’s perspectives not because of any epistemological impasse, but merely due to an unwillingness to even engage with another’s cultural perspective. Too often when we communicate science we cleave to polarising narratives that create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach to science communication – which can exclude a large proportion of the world’s population. There is no ‘them’, there is only an ‘us’.

In an increasingly globalised world where we all have multiple identities it is not possible to delineate between communities or cultures in the simplistic ways of the past. We cannot therefore assume, as has been done in previous years, that it is possible to create divisions between any culture – be that a disciplinary cultural divide between science and humanities or a cultural divide between world views.

In my work I have had the opportunity to meet a number of people from many different cultures, communities and faiths. Sometimes my perspective on how we view the world might differ from those I meet, but I have as yet not had the misfortune to meet someone who is so set in his own world view that we cannot openly engage in a discussion about those differences. In some surprising and heart-warming circumstances I have found considerable common ground with those who initially felt they were in opposition to my work communicating evolutionary science but have since become firm supporters. At other times I have come away with my own prejudices and misconceptions challenged and found a new respect or understanding of another’s world view even if it is one I do not wholly share.

What I hope we will see at the conference at the American University of Sharjah is an opportunity to openly share different perspectives on the issues and challenges at the core of scientific discourse that are fundamental to all societies’ growth. But more importantly I would hope that by bringing people together from different countries with different beliefs and world views, we will each take our part of the jigsaw and place it together – so that in the future we can build a clearer global picture of how to communicate science in a more effective way as we face the many challenges ahead of us all in the 21st century.

To join in the discussion on Twitter, the conference hashtag is #BIDSCM and you can find the official Belief in Dialogue Twitter account here.

Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages

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James.JPGThis week’s guest blogger is James Hannam, he has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (published in the UK as God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).

The award of the Templeton Prize to the retired president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, has reawakened the controversy over science and religion. I have had the pleasure of meeting Lord Rees a couple of times, including when my book God’s Philosophers (newly released in the US as The Genesis of Science) was shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. I doubt he has welcomed the fuss over the Templeton Foundation, but neither will he be particularly perturbed by it.

the genesis of science.JPGFew topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

god designing uni.bmpBut religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.

Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

It was only during the “enlightenment” that the idea took root that Christianity had been a serious impediment to science. Voltaire and his fellow philosophes opposed the Catholic Church because of its close association with France’s absolute monarchy. Accusing clerics of holding back scientific development was a safe way to make a political point. The cudgels were later taken up by TH Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, in his struggle to free English science from any sort of clerical influence. Creationism did the rest of the job of persuading the public that Christianity and science are doomed to perpetual antagonism.

Nonetheless, today, science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet. Both are capable of doing enormous good, but their chances of doing so are much greater if they can work together. The award of the Templeton Prize to Lord Rees is a small step in the right direction.

The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution is available now.

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize

“Well-researched and hugely enjoyable.” New Scientist

“A spirited jaunt through centuries of scientific development… captures the wonder of the medieval world: its inspirational curiosity and its engaging strangeness.” Sunday Times

“This book contains much valuable material summarised with commendable no-nonsense clarity… James Hannam has done a fine job of knocking down an old caricature.” Sunday Telegraph