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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

On Curiosity (From WONDERING ABOUT)


The humility I have described here is not the humility we see (not always in sincere form) in various Eastern religious leaders and the like, although it is related.  I am speaking of intellectual humility:  the ability to accept that anything one has come to believe, whether it be from schooling or a church, from books, parents or other authorities, or even as the product of one’s own observations and thoughts, could genuinely be mistaken; mistaken no matter how much observation and thought or the weight of authority or time lend to it.  Or how many people hold the belief, for how many centuries.  It is the recognition of human limitations and fallibility, even among the most brilliant, well-educated minds.  My personal favorite example of this is Einstein adding the so-called Cosmological Constant to his equations for General Relativity to prevent, for what were mainly esthetic reasons of his, an expanding (or contracting) universe, something which his raw equations implied.  When Edwin Hubble was within barely a decade to demonstrate by his observations of the red shifts of distant galaxies that the universe is in fact expanding, Einstein pronounced this ad-hoc addition of the Cosmological Constant the greatest blunder of his career.  What makes this example my favorite is how a more recent discovery in cosmology, that the universe is not only expanding but that, contrary to all expectations the expansion rate is accelerating (the mutual gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to be slowing it down, yet it is speeding up), has resurrected Einstein’s self-disavowed constant, albeit in somewhat different form.  Einstein’s confession of his greatest blunder may thus prove itself an even greater error, an irony I have to expect he would have enjoyed.

Another, important aspect to humility is the overwhelming feeling, shared by most of us I suspect, at looking upon a universe not only greater than our ability to fully understand, but, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane observed (though he used the word queerer rather than greater), greater than we can understand.  One of the most wondrous and compelling things about science, which is such a large part of the reasons I have spent a lifetime immersed in it, is how strange and wonderful it can make the most “ordinary” of things, simply by the act of explaining them.

Degenerative disc disease

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deg...