Gelial's Blurbs

When you consider the beauty of the world, and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you’re naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration, and you almost feel a desire to worship something. I feel this, and recognize that other people as well.

All of us share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life, for the shear magnitude of the cosmos, the shear magnitude of geological time. And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship, into a desire to worship a particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator.

What science has now achieved is emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator, and it’s a major emancipation. Humans have an almost overwhelming desire to think that they’ve explained something, by attributing it to a maker. We’re so used to explaining things in our own world, like television cameras, lights, chairs we sit on and clothes we wear. Everything we see around us is a manufactured object, and so it’s so tempting to believe that living things, stars, mountains or rivers, have all been made by something.

It was a supreme achievement of the human intellect to realize that there’s a better explanation for these things. These things can come about by purely natural causes.

When science began, the aim to achieve it was there but we didn’t know enough. Nowadays, at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, we still don’t know everything, but we’ve achieved an enormous amount in the way of understanding. We now understand essentially how life came to be, we know that we’re all cousins of all animals and plants, we know that they descended from a common ancestor which might of be something like bacteria, we know the process language that came about. We don’t know the details, but we understand essentially how it came about. There are still gaps in our understanding, we don’t understand how the cosmos came into existence in the first place, but we’re working on that.

The scientific enterprise is an active, seeking out of gaps in our knowledge, seeking out of ignorance, so that we can work in eliminating that ignorance. But religion teaches us to be satisfied with not really understanding. Every one of these difficult questions that comes up, Science says: “Right! Let’s roll up or sleeves and work on it”, Religion says: “Oh God did it! We don’t need to work on it, God did. It’s as simple as that.” We have no thrusting force, pushing us on to try to understand. Religion stops the impulse to understand because religion provides a facile, easy apparent explanation, of what isn’t really an explanation, and it prevents the further work on the problem.

The Earth does in fact rotate around the Sun and the empirical evidence is: the shift in the stars’ parallax angles.

However, from a fundamental point of view, that is, from the point of view of the fundamental nature of space (as the “stage” where stuff happens), it is actually irrelevant whether it’s the Earth that rotates around the Sun or the other way around.

And the fact that this is irrelevant is far from trivial.

The same is true of a simpler situation. If two objects are moving in straight lines (at constant speeds), it is irrelevant which object is actually moving.

Galileo was the first to write about this relative property of motion (in straight lines at constant speeds), and Newton was the first to put it into a mathematically useful form. However, it was Einstein who deduced the true significance of the fact that motion is relative.

His two theories of relativity are precisely about the implications of the fact that motion in space (and time) is relative.

There are a number of fascinating things that have to do with the fact that motion is relative – things like Noether’s theorem and conservation laws (eg, Why is energy conserved? What does that really mean, anyway?), and why gravity is the key to make accelerated motion also relative. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time nor the inclination to give a lecture here.

Suffice it to say that the fact that motion is fundamentally relative is the cornerstone of much of modern physics.

Copernicus certainly never dreamed that his heliocentric hypothesis would be at the center of something so much bigger and so much more important than just our solar system.