Venus

Venus is brilliant in the early morning sky, clearly the disc of a planet, not a far off star. It’s so lovely against the pale blue of the eastern sky, peeking between deep grey clouds. To the southwest the stars of Orion are already starting to fade. I think about the stars and planets that disappear from view when our patch of earth turns towards the sun.  If I stood on a turntable in the middle of the room and spun slowly around looking straight ahead, I would see a slightly different view of the room at every moment, some parts coming into view as others disappeared. But the room wouldn’t be changing, it would always be the same room. And so it is with the big space in which little earth is suspended.  We turn our faces to a different view of it moment by moment, from sunsets through starry nights to spectacular red dawns to the full light of day.  The stars seem to appear and disappear, the sun to rise and set.  But it is only our turning that changes what we see, the light of the nearby sun blinding us to the stars during the day.

I’m so glad I had the opportunity to study Ptolemy and Copernicus, not just to read a paragraph or even a chapter about their ideas, but to spend months following their mathematics, proof by proof. Many of us came to believe that when careful measurements of the positions of the sun and planets caused Ptolemy to account for the data with epicycles, he actually understood that it must be the earth and other planets moving around the sun rather than all of them circling us.  The logic of the epicycles was so tortured, he must have known it was flawed. But how could you make people who did not see the astronomical data believe that the earth, the solid, stable earth, was both turning on its axis and revolving in an elliptical orbit around the sun? The mathematics demanded it, but common sense refused it. And so he either chose to believe his own fiction, or he kept his head down and only published the acceptable fiction. Science can be dangerous.

How do we get people to accept the reality of the great damage we are doing to our planet, damage that gets harder to reverse with every passing polluting day? The Glimmerglass Film Festival included a film about rising sea levels drowning the low lands around the Chesapeake Bay. One of the narrators sits a way offshore in a small boat and tells us that the seabed below him used to be the infield where he played ball as a boy. I don’t know if he was persuaded by the accounts of scientists before he saw the evidence with his own eyes in his own known world. I do know that a great many people who accept scientific evidence do so only on faith, not because they really understand how science works and what its limits are. Most people who believe that the earth rotates daily and revolves round the sun do so because they have faith that scientists are telling them the truth, not because they understand the measurements that led scientists to accept the heliocentric hypothesis.

It seems so important to me to study scientists who were wrong, to understand both the limits and strengths of science. But we don’t teach it that way.  We teach science as if it gave us certain facts, immutable truth, not evolving understanding.  We teach it as if it were religion, to be taken on faith.  And so if we’re offered a different religion or “alternative facts” we think it’s just a choice about what you want to believe – not understanding the fundamental difference between the scientific way of understanding and faith-based claims of truth.

There is so much that we don’t understand yet.  Peter got me to read a fascinating article in the Times on the placebo effect.  It got me thinking about all we don’t yet know about the relationship between the mind and the rest of the body. But while I know the science on this subject is very immature, I also know that this field is open to scientific exploration.  If we study it rigorously and test hypotheses carefully and with checks on our prejudices we can advance our knowledge. I was so lucky to learn the difference between knowledge and faith, but so little in conventional education insists on that difference.  If you just read text books and don’t follow the tedious work and wrong paths of scientists, it’s a lot easier to mistake science for faith.

And then there is another way of knowing, the way of the artist. The last film I saw this weekend was a wonderful documentary of Andy Goldsworthy’s work, “Leaning Into The Wind”. After two hours of watching Goldsworthy at work reshaping the natural world I walked out into a world that looked different to me, a world that might be transformed by the presence of a line of red leaves meticulously placed on stone stairs. I can’t say how my vision was changed by seeing his, and I don’t know if it’s a subject that is even open to scientific inquiry. But the artists shift our understanding as surely as the scientists do.

Venus is beautiful in the morning sky. I can account for where and when I see it, but I cannot account for why the sight makes my heart leap.