Jan vs. Wild: April 2009

"I take issue with a lot of things in the church... and that's why I'm still a member." --Katie

That was a quote from a talk I had last night with Katie, wherein we discussed that if we understood every doctrine taught in the church, and everything made perfect logical sense, that very fact would prove it was wrong. As mere mortal beings, with such a tenuous grasp on even the mortal things around us--physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc--how can we expect to understand and comprehend every minute detail of something infinite and eternal that stretches so far beyond this plane of existence? While that doesn't mean we should try to learn about it and understand it to the best of our ability, we shouldn't expect, in this life at least, to reach a point where we say "Okay, this is it, I've got it!" and obtain a perfect understanding.

It reminded me of a beautiful quote from C.S. Lewis:

On my view the theories are not themselves the thing you are asked to accept. Many of you no doubt have read Jeans or Eddington. What they do when they want to explain the atom, or something of that sort, is to give you a description out of which you can make a mental picture. But then they warn you that this picture is not what the scientists actually believe. What the scientists believe is a mathematical formula. The pictures are there only to help you to understand the formula. They are not really true in the way the formula is; they do not give you the real thing but only something more or less like it. They are only meant to help, and if they do not help you can drop them. The thing itself cannot be pictured, it can only be expressed mathematically. We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be-the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good will it be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

I once taught a lesson using this quote. I compared it to the Bohr model of the atom (for two reasons: (1), I'm a scientist, so that's what language speaks to me, and (2) I was in Denmark at the time, and everyone there knows Niels Bohr). This model is incorrect. Scientists now know it's incorrect. Atoms aren't really like a little orange with tiny circles flying around it like bees. Bohr probably knew this even at the time. However, the model is accurate enough that we can model at atom with it, while still being simple enough that we can actually understand it, and that it's still useful to us. We can use the Bohr model to predict many things about atoms that are completely correct. We do this knowing that the model isn't completely right, but that's okay. If we had a model that was completely 100% correct, it would be so incredibly complicated that it wouldn't be of any use because we wouldn't be able to do anything with it. Calculations would take ages, even on the fastest super computers. Explaining it to students would be nigh impossible. Whereas with the Bohr model, one can make calculations without even using a calculator. It's not that scientists are content with ignorance, but rather that they know how to use things that work for them. A simplified model that allows understanding and progress is better than no model at all.

It's been a while since I posted anything on here so I thought I'd put up some pictures of my latest adventures. We went to the Science Museum where I drug Chris to the Theater of Electricity to see the Lightning Show which was awesome, as usual.

I pretty much freaked out at Mathematica, the hall of Math. It was awesome.

There was a wall with a time line of mathematics on it and I recognized almost every name: Minkowski, Hilbert, Poincare, Cantor, Hermite, Riemann, Kronecker, Von Neumann... I was getting all excited flitting from person to person. I realized what a geek that made me, but it didn't stop me. :)