Friday 10 November 2000

Pic of the day: Mad scientist? Screenshot from The Sims.

Mad scientist

From my early childhood, I have been a scientist type. I am not actually a scientist by career; I've been working with economy, and later with computers. Yet I was interested in various kinds of science from before school. When I was 5 I learned to read typeset text like books and papers, and would soon grab my big brother's chemistry books and retreat to the attic, which I for some obscure reason called "klokingshulen" (Perhaps meaning "the wise one's cavern". An alternate meaning is "the cavern dedicated to the process of growing wise".)

My parents subtly encouraged this scientist streak in me, I guess. Of course it helps that they were both bright and inquisitive themselves, and so were my brothers. But my brothers had more work to do and more of a social life, so I may have spent more time than the rest with books. My parents were poor by Norwegian standards, pinching pennies right and left by using darned and mended clothes while home on the farm, making most of our food from local resources etc. But they would buy books about planets, dinosaurs, molluscs or wherever my fancy took me. I even got a big illustrated encyclopaedia of enthomology. I'm sure some of my brothers still remember the latin names I threw around...

I did not do particularly well in school until my late teens. Until a few days ago, I always assumed this was because I was not nearly as intelligent as my brothers. But then I met my brothers again ... Hehe. No, they may actually be more intelligent than I; I'm sure at least one of them is. But the difference is not enormous enough to explain the poor grades I got. Instead I've noticed another difference: They are more realistic than me. Well, they certainly were, and I think they still are. They went with the system where I did not. If some topic in school did not interest me, I tended to just ignore it. I avoided my homework whenever possible, to read about distant planets or make up elaborate fantasy worlds. By and large, I am still like that.

So, sadly, I would probably have made a poor scientist. Genius is not the biggest part of science, especially these days. No, a scientist has to pay attention to details. Has to keep order. Has to be systematic, thorough, perhaps even neat. Ugh. So much for that dream. I might have made a scientist, but not a good scientist. More like a mad scientist ...

***

Like my father, I never saw a conflict between science and religion. In part this may be because I did not believe the creation story in Genesis to be literal, but a simplified story to drive home the most central points: That we humans are the latest addition to creation, that we are all closely related, and that we've lost our innocence and have to take responsibility for our actions as well as for our planet. I still see nothing strange in that. When I was a small child, I learned that electrons circle the nucleus of the atom, much like planets around the sun. This is just plain wrong, but it was as close an approximation as my mind could grasp at the time. It makes sense to me that the bronze age tribe of Hebrews was not exactly ready for the Big Bang and cosmic inflation either ...

On the other side of the coin, I never grasped how people can see an ordered, lawful universe as a proof that there is no god. I guess they have a very different concept of gods than I have. Christianity (and to some extent Judaism, I think) portrays God as a heavenly Father. I don't know about yours, but my father did not spend his time capriciously introducing chaos in the system. Quite the opposite: He was building, ordering, improving, and mostly just working to make the farm run smoothly. Perhaps I would feel different if my father had been a politician ... (just kidding!)

***

Even though I failed to actually become a scientist, I've always enjoyed learning about science. When I was young, I was quite starved for the stuff. I would even read German in order to snatch some popular science. But during the last couple decades, the trickle of science has grown to a huge flood. Several popular science magazines flourished here in Norway. Most of them are gone now, as American and English magazines are widely available and my generation read English fairly well. (The kids now are even better at it.) And of course, we've got the Internet.

I could probably spend all my free time digging out the newest tidbits of various sciences. But I won't do that. Instead, I have for a while been putting it all together. I feel that I have a coherent worldview now. The various sciences seamlessly change into one another. I feel like I'm standing under an unbroken expanse of sky, where there are no lines dividing east from west or north from south - it's all a whole. In this picture some sciences just are not there. Or rather, they are not where people see them. Astrology, for instance, is not a science of the stars but of the mind. Its place is firmly in the middle of psychology and sociology. This is probably a good thing, what with the yearly discovery of new celestial bodies in our solar system alone...

In the same way, I'm afraid we are at the end of "natural theology". The idea that we could infer the nature of the Creator from the creation of nature. This has always been a hard thing to do, nature being so varied. But now - with the very real possibility of an immense number of multiple universes, probably with different natural laws, perhaps with different number of dimensions, where time in one universe may be distance in another ... For a mind to hold this awe-inspiring view, and then imagine some kind of entity greater than that again ... I have no doubt that anyone who try will go stark raving mad. Thank you, but I prefer to dumb down a bit and keep what sanity I still have.

At least, I'm not trying to create miniture black holes on Earth, the way the Large Hadron Collider project just might.