As
someone who really loves science and the scientific method, I suffer from a
very serious problem. I am not, in even the slightest sense, scientifically
literate. As much as I love reading about scientific advances and improvements,
when I go to talk about them later, the specifics I just read will have already flown from my mind. Instead, I end up
stumbling to remember words and concepts that, moments earlier, seemed to
enlighten my entire worldview.
Contrast
that with the fact that I can remember, at a moment's notice, the words and
chords to songs I learned on the guitar or sang along with on the radio forty
years ago with unerring precision, and you can see pretty much how my mind is
wired. I’m a words and music kind of guy; math and science, not so much.
I
often find myself wishing that each scientific breakthrough came with a set of
‘talking points’ aimed at people like me – people who want to understand the
basics of what is being discussed and why it's important, but who don’t have the
training or expertise to sort through the actual science.
Which
is why an article as brilliantly written as this one by Lawrence Krauss on the
Higgs “particle” discovery, it makes me feel very happy. Dr. Krauss is, of
course, appropriately renowned for his brilliance, but here he manages to make
a bafflingly complex scientific principle understandable to the common man or
woman.
I mean, talk about ‘talking points': here is his summation of why the Higgs
discovery is important:
· First, it caps
one of the most remarkable intellectual adventures in human history — one that
anyone interested in the progress of knowledge should at least be aware of.
· Second, it makes
even more remarkable the precarious accident that allowed our existence to form
from nothing — further proof that the universe of our senses is just the tip of
a vast, largely hidden cosmic iceberg.
· And finally, the
effort to uncover this tiny particle represents the very best of what the
process of science can offer to modern civilization.
That’s
brilliant, simple, almost poetic.
Krauss goes on to explain the physics behind the discovery in terms that
are accessible to anyone with a high school degree who wants to try to grasp
what he’s saying. And he likens the CERN supercollider to the great Cathedrals
of Europe. Both are “works of incomparable grandeur that celebrate the beauty
of being alive.”
He
finishes with the following bit of inspired analogy:
…last week’s discovery
will change our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. Surely that is
the hallmark of great music, great literature, great art ...and great science.
Amen
to that, Brother Krauss!
