The Poetry of Science

Spent part of the afternoon today on leave to attend the Howard University Secular Students presentation of Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about The Poetry of Science. They moved from the expanding universe ("you can't see the universe before it was there") to the age of the earth and the possibility of life elsewhere ("even if life is incredibly unlikely, the universe is so stupendously huge, and old, that unlikely things happen every day"). Tyson pointed out that biologists have a sample of one ("no other science could exist with such a small sample - one planet out of eight - yes, eight, get over it!") and wondered about DNA and intelligence and math. Tyson totally rocks - I'd never seen him talking for any extended period of time.


When they took questions, some of them were odd - the guy who wanted to know what they thought of philosophy didn't get the answer he wanted, since Tyson was pretty dismissive of the value of philosophy to science, though they both said philosophers have plenty of other realms to think about. And the woman who was afraid when she saw people holding cell phones up to babies' heads certainly wasn't ready to have Tyson explain how "when you're trying to measure something that isn't there" you get all sorts of random results, some spikes that look like positives but as many in the opposite directions showing less cancer, and that it's all pretty much white noise - "if it was truly causal, it would be a huge result, it would unmistakable, and it would be replicable." And the guy who insisted that they take his question, a rambling question about Boethius that basically boiled down "aren't you so hypocritical that if you were dying you'd find your refuge in God?" - well, what he got was Tyson saying "If I were going to die, I'd ask to be buried, not cremated, so that the energy in my body could return to the earth, and nourish flora and fauna as I have been nourished by them."

All in all, it was entertaining and educational.


More photos here