Sincere Science

Although I find myself curious about and deriving benefit from many areas of human endeavor, science has always appealed to me more than fields such as philosophy, law, medicine, or the arts. We each have our inherent skills and talents that steer us to focus on one field more than another, but we also choose on the basis of the attributes that appeal to us. For example, one may have an analytic bent that leads them to become a lawyer, but one may also just like the way that law establishes an ordered society.

Besides having a mind that is comfortable in the scientific realm, I like science for its sincerity. That is not to suggest that scientists are any more sincere or honest than philosophers or artists, but that they practice a discipline that tends to enforce honesty and sincerity. In other fields of knowledge, one can more easily get away with shading the truth. The practice of law comes readily to mind. Lawyers and politicians (most of them being lawyers) have a rightfully earned reputation for questionable morals and often unscrupulous behavior.

This is not to say that scientists are always ethical or trustworthy. History is replete with occasional examples of scientists who cheated. The difference—and it’s pretty much all the difference in the world—is that their subterfuges are more likely to be exposed. Statements made or published by scientists are more easily verified than in other fields.

A theory or publication in science must be presented in a way that the argument is both replicable and falsifiable—otherwise it’s regarded as unworthy. Other scientists must be able to replicate the experiment and get the same result. If not, the theory is rejected. It must also be falsifiable—meaning that it is stated in a way that it can be shown to be false, if it indeed is. Otherwise it’s useless as a theory. If I pose, for example, the theory that life exists on Mars under a rock, it’s virtually impossible to demonstrate that I’m wrong; for every rock you turn over, I’ll simply maintain that you’ve not yet found the right rock.

Some scientists like to enjoy the limelight and love to have the media sensationalize their work. (Speaking of the media, there’s another area where dishonesty often gets infused in disreputable reports.) But the field that scientists have chosen imposes a certain degree of humility on them—whether they want it or not. Whenever they publish a scientific finding, it will soon be verified or shown to be rubbish by another researcher. It’s a self-correcting process. (And that points out another example of dishonesty in the media: they will rush to publish a sensational statement by a scientist, but not bother to report later when that statement is shown to be wrong.)

The scientific process—when followed appropriately—reveals the truth, step-by-step. Deceivers are exposed, sooner or later, simply by the nature of the discipline. That potential disclosure helps keep most scientists honest and sincere. (I said most.)

A Visit From Charlie—Part 2

Charlie paid us yet another unannounced visit a couple of days ago. He drove up in his big, extended-cab diesel truck, telling us that he was passing by and just had to stop in and see how we were doing. He had some new ideas about his dream house that he would soon be building and wanted to share them with us. No matter that we were about to engage in our afternoon taiji exercises, or were planning a hot tub afterwards, or even that President Obama was coming by for a consultation that evening. Charlie was here and wanted to share his dream!

OK, I can forego the taiji exercise and even Barak’s appointment, but the hot tub will happen tonight, Charlie. So, sit down and have a cup of coffee. But you need to understand that soon we will have a crucial task to attend to: soaking our bodies in that hot water.

Nursing his cuppa caffeine, he begins to wax on about his new ideas. As he rattles on, he looks around and soaks in another of our construction details to ask us about; but he hardly listens to my response, as he once again interrupts to tell us what he wants to create.

In time, he finally begins to wind down and says he must go. He repeats this about-to-leave ritual several times, as additional thoughts pop into his mind and he’s once again launched himself into dreamland. Finally, it’s really time to go. Whew! I need to start the fire in the hot tub, if we’re gonna bathe before the evening expires. With many thanks for the coffee and the chance to chat, Charlie climbs up into his big diesel, fires up the noisy engine and drives off into the deepening night.

I hustle outside to get the hot-tub woodstove fire going and am looking forward to our relaxing submersion into its healing waters, when I hear Charlie’s clattering diesel coming back down the drive! Yikes, what does he want now?! Has he thought of yet another cool detail to share with us? Do we have to forsake the evening’s bath for another chapter of Charlie’s vision?

He hurries from his truck, profusely apologizing that he has lost his cell phone. Have we seen it? Did he leave it here? It’s a new iPhone, with all his business information implanted in it and his demeanor tells me that he’s nearly in a state of panic over its possible loss. He’s gone from joy to frantic, in just a few minutes.

We head back in the house, report the emergency to my wife, and cast around every place he’s been inside, to no avail. She remembers that he did have it just before departing, so we can establish that it must be hiding somewhere in the immediate vicinity. We have no luck finding it inside the house, so Charlie and I head out to the driveway area, scouring the ground with flashlights, praying to find the phone—Charlie, hoping to recover his precious toy and me hoping we quickly locate it so he gets the hell out of here and allows the hot tub preparations to continue.

           

We see no sign of it on the ground. Whew! I was dreadfully anticipating that we might find it crushed into a black plastic pancake by his truck, and we’d end up consoling a sobbing Charlie—right through our hot tub night. I wonder if it might have slipped out of his pocket, onto the floor behind his seat, so he dives into the cab of his truck, tossing various items of clothing and tools about, but comes up without his precious iPhone.

What next? My wife comes onto the scene and suggests that she call his phone, to see if that may help locate it, when it rings. Charlie gives her his number and she dials and we intently listen. Charlie shouts that he thinks he heard it, but the noise of his diesel engine has drowned it out. He cuts the engine and she dials again. Shouting out again, Charlie dives back into his truck and rummages around furiously in the piles of rubble—finally triumphantly emerging with his iPhone in hand!

He exhibits a mixture of relief and shame at how the incident has turned out. He profusely apologizes, saying that we must think he is really stupid and wish that he never comes around again. He knows he’s spoiled our bath. I try to assure him that we are mostly happy that he has found his phone, wish him well, and assure him we’ll still get the bath in—hoping that he quickly drives out again and stays away this time.

Later, when the hot tub has reached its full temperature and I’m soaking deep in its healing waters, I can begin to smile and chuckle at the evening’s episode. May your dreams be realized, Charlie! Come on back, sometime; but for now, leave me alone to soak, please.

A Visit From Charlie—Part 1

Both our homestead and lifestyle are unconventional and differ markedly from the average American domicile standard. Our house is underground and we live in a low-cost manner; in that we pump water by hand, use an outdoor composting privy, grow much of our food, and exist on a fraction of electricity, compared to “normal” consumption. To our urban friends, we are a curiosity—either just too strange to comprehend or maybe fun to visit from time to time, but just to look at what we are doing and to see if we are still managing to keep it up.

To our rural neighbors, however, we are less a curiosity than a sensible-living couple. Yet we are the newbies: the immigrant couple (even though we’ve lived here for 28 years) who live in a prudent way (as they do); but we still seem a little weird to them. They can understand our mode of living better than our urban friends can, because it is closer to their modest-to-low-income existence. Many of them never graduated high school and they all struggle to get by, although they manage to get along quite well. Yet our style of living still is a bit of a stretch for them; because, if they had more money, they would live more like our urban friends. Since they’ve had to learn how to get along quite fine on limited resources, however, they can better understand what we have chosen as a way to live.

Now and then we are visited by a neighbor who very much appreciates the life we’ve carved out, and even values what we have done to create this low-cost way we live. Charlie is an example of one of these folks. He periodically comes by, specifically to savor our house and lifestyle. He is a simple, minimally-educated, hard-working guy. He is a contractor who’s in business for himself. He’s an honest guy who appreciates the value of constructing things with one’s hands and enjoys his own simple way of life, which avoids becoming hooked into mortgages, big credit card balances, and other mainstream activities.

Charlie somehow stumbled upon us and how we live, several years ago. He has taken to dropping by unannounced every now and then, to take another look at our digs and tell us about his dream of carving out a similar way of living, if he can just get a little money set aside first. He has many questions about how we did things—being a practical, hands-on guy who can appreciate the simplicity of it. He rattles on about his dream house and where he’d like to build it: someplace way out in the boonies, so government officials would not even know he existed. He’d install solar power, use novel building techniques, live self-sufficiently, and be sure that neighbors were far enough away that they couldn’t be seen or heard.

To us, Charlie’s dream seems destined to remain just a wee bit out of his reach. For nearly a decade now he has dropped by, always describing to us his latest plan, which appears no closer now than when we first met him. But he can dream, can’t he?

Over the years he has discovered many alternative building schemes, which he eagerly describes to us. Upon each visit, the scheme gets updated by a new and more exciting method that he’s recently discovered. It appears to me that his grasp of these alternative building techniques is often not very deep; he is always enthused about the possibilities, but seems rather thin on the practicalities of them.

Some of them I have read about and realize that his understanding needs a lot more development before he could ever implement it. Some of the building concepts he describes I have never heard about; but as he explains them, my prior experience and technical background finds me doubting that it is a reasonable way to build in this area. Maybe that idea works okay in a tropical environment, Charlie, but I’m not so sure it makes sense in this temperate zone we live in. Or: that’s a neat-sounding concept, Charlie, but have you thought about how it’s going to be to actually live in that kind of house?

These are thoughts that remain in my mind…I never express them out loud to him. His bubbling visit is not the time or place to throw a little cold water on his hot ideas. He’s not telling me about his plans, in order to get a critique of them. He doesn’t need a lesson on why his latest idea might be a problem from a heat transfer perspective or a structural engineering standpoint. He simply needs to excitedly share his dream. He needs to sit in a chair, cradle his cup of coffee, look around him at things we have done, and jabber about his own unique ideas of his castle in the air. Besides, he is too energized about his visions to be able to listen to what practicalities I might have to offer at the moment. He rattles on, hardly aware of any comments on his plans that I might suggest.

More on Charlie’s visit next time…

Unlikely Alone—Part 2

If life is discovered on other worlds, it will have a profound impact on our psyches. Some of us will have the foundations of our beliefs dramatically shifted and will have to rethink our basic convictions. Earth and humans will no longer occupy the pinnacle; this precious little planet will no longer be the only vital place in the universe. Others will rejoice that the cosmos is as rich as we could ever have imagined. 

The discovery of extraterrestrial life—if it comes—will not come any time soon, however. Moreover, the forms of life we discover will quite probably be of a type that we as yet can't begin to guess. Our current expectations of what we might find are probably too restrictive. The various scenarios that TV and movies have portrayed (aliens who usually look and talk like us—especially using modern English) are far too limiting.

Scientists have frequently speculated on what kinds of life we might find out there—describing the conditions under which “life as we know it” may exist. We’re coming to see that that view is too narrow, as we've been taken aback by the new types of life we've found right here on Earth—the so-called “extremophiles” that I mentioned earlier. Clearly our understanding of types of beings that we can't currently conceive of will soon be expanded even more, as we continue to explore our planet. 

I also wonder if we could even recognize some other strange form of life elsewhere in the universe, were we to encounter it tomorrow. It took us a long time to “discover” some of those extremophiles right here on Earth. 

To date, we have only one example of life and only one vital planet that we know about. With just a single sample, there's no saying that life has evolved “out there” as it has here. Even if we could rewind history and replay evolution on Earth, there's no telling what creatures would roam our planet today—but it certainly would be dramatically different. So many random events occurred along the way that would never be repeated—events that changed the course of evolution and altered life. (Think of the improbable asteroid that blew away the dominant dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, removing them and opening up so many niches for mammals.)   

Furthermore, it's taken something on the order of 3-4 billion years for life on Earth to evolve from some unknown ancient seed to the complexity we see today—that’s several billion years for a technologically proficient form of life to evolve on our friendly little planet. The chances of our finding life on some distant planet that is anywhere near as advanced (or immature) as humans are has got to be incredibly remote—given that they may have begun billions of years before us or are just getting started. We might find ourselves unable to communicate with beings who are either primitive or much further advanced than we. 

And the distances involved! The universe may be teeming with life, but those beings could be so unimaginably far away that we may remain ignorant of them forever.

So, where are we, in being able to answer the question, Are we alone? We've no more a definitive answer than 100 years ago. It's still an unknown, even though the likelihood seems to be much greater than even a year ago. Expect to live with the mystery for a good while yet. Don't hold your breath—just open your mind a little more to the possibility.