![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Universe is still the niftiest program on TV (History channel if you want to set your Tivos, and please believe me that YOU DO). I think I may have to give in and just go ahead and buy the DVD sets because I'm never going to get tired of watching it. Hrmm...I do have a birthday coming up. Perhaps I could put it on lists and whatnot. At the moment it is the one show above all others that make me stupidly happy to have bought the big screen TV. Because, yes, there is joy in being able to practically count David Tennant's freckles in my living room, but even that pales in comparison to watching the universe zoom past you at 40 inches.
Tonight's promises to be all about dark energy, which just makes me giddy with anticipation. What is it? Who knows. And nothing is more fun to watch than theoretical scientists try to explain stuff they don't yet know. There's a serene sort of calm and awe they demonstrate that comes with explaining settled questions. But when they get to the stuff that's still confusing and mysterious? Little kids with a new toy. They bounce and vibrate all over the place 'It could be this, and maybe that and if I stand on my head and squint with one eye and chant 'PENGUIN' it sort of makes sense, SEE?!?!?' Anyone who thinks the hard sciences don't require creativity has yet to meet a theoretical astrophysicist is all I'm saying.
Somewhat tangental but not, I'm becoming ever more confused at how young earth Creationists hang on to their beliefs. Denial of evolution I sort of get, there's a certain level of trust you have to invest in scientists unless you're willing to learn some pretty complex biology to truly get the level of overwhelming evidence supporting it. So I can kind of get how you could handwave it and continue to exist in a bubble of denial. But the stuff that exists in space contradicting that view...it's...well, it's right there. You can point a telescope at the sky and take a picture of it. We have pictures. I'm not talking about the whackadoodle stuff like string theory or dark energy and such, which does require you to believe the scientists involved understand the math that you can't. I'm talking about the kind of evidence that even the most uninformed layman can see as tangible with their own two eyes. How on earth do you explain that away? You can document things like distance and speed, in ways which we can all understand...I mean, I know how far away from me the cup on my desk is and how to measure that distance, I can judge how fast my cat is currently chasing the toy mouse across the floor right now. And there are the bits of the universe moving faster and father away from each other. It helps to understand how they calculate that, but if you can look at a picture taken one day and compare it to a picture taken at a later day and the things are farther away from each other than they were before...there it is. Do you just have to completely ignore the whole science of astronomy? Pretend it doesn't exist? Do they sit around telling each other the photographs taken from telescopes are staged? How does that work? I mean, you can easily work in everything we're learning with a metaphorical view of Genesis...but I don't see how you absorb it from a literal view without your head exploding.
In conclusion, science SO COOL.
Tonight's promises to be all about dark energy, which just makes me giddy with anticipation. What is it? Who knows. And nothing is more fun to watch than theoretical scientists try to explain stuff they don't yet know. There's a serene sort of calm and awe they demonstrate that comes with explaining settled questions. But when they get to the stuff that's still confusing and mysterious? Little kids with a new toy. They bounce and vibrate all over the place 'It could be this, and maybe that and if I stand on my head and squint with one eye and chant 'PENGUIN' it sort of makes sense, SEE?!?!?' Anyone who thinks the hard sciences don't require creativity has yet to meet a theoretical astrophysicist is all I'm saying.
Somewhat tangental but not, I'm becoming ever more confused at how young earth Creationists hang on to their beliefs. Denial of evolution I sort of get, there's a certain level of trust you have to invest in scientists unless you're willing to learn some pretty complex biology to truly get the level of overwhelming evidence supporting it. So I can kind of get how you could handwave it and continue to exist in a bubble of denial. But the stuff that exists in space contradicting that view...it's...well, it's right there. You can point a telescope at the sky and take a picture of it. We have pictures. I'm not talking about the whackadoodle stuff like string theory or dark energy and such, which does require you to believe the scientists involved understand the math that you can't. I'm talking about the kind of evidence that even the most uninformed layman can see as tangible with their own two eyes. How on earth do you explain that away? You can document things like distance and speed, in ways which we can all understand...I mean, I know how far away from me the cup on my desk is and how to measure that distance, I can judge how fast my cat is currently chasing the toy mouse across the floor right now. And there are the bits of the universe moving faster and father away from each other. It helps to understand how they calculate that, but if you can look at a picture taken one day and compare it to a picture taken at a later day and the things are farther away from each other than they were before...there it is. Do you just have to completely ignore the whole science of astronomy? Pretend it doesn't exist? Do they sit around telling each other the photographs taken from telescopes are staged? How does that work? I mean, you can easily work in everything we're learning with a metaphorical view of Genesis...but I don't see how you absorb it from a literal view without your head exploding.
In conclusion, science SO COOL.