Stranger Than We Can Imagine

The universe is a strange and wondrous place; children seem to know this instinctively, as we always note a "child-like sense of wonder." But this sense of wonder need not be limited to children--everyone should experience this sense of wonder, at so many points in their lives. If one can pass through this life and never experience this sense of wonder at some of the marvelous things in the world, then I truly feel sorry for them. Sometimes science is accused of "unweaving the rainbow," to quote John Keats, but even the most basic understanding of science shouldn't destroy one's sense of wonder, it should heighten it! Science has solved a number of the mysteries of the world, and is hard at work explaining the currently unexplained. The Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the solar system, nor is the Earth the center of the universe, the entire cosmos formed for the sole purpose of entertaining humanity. Our species was not the result of a special creation, the world given to us alone--we've been dethroned from the pedestal that we thought we occupied. Even studies of our ape relatives are revealing that many of the characteristics we thought belonged to us alone belong to apes as well. The universe seems a cold and impersonal place, indifferent to the fate of humanity.

But if this is the picture you take away with you from science, then you are missing the point. The universe was not designed for us, to be sure, and to think that this is so is to be guilty of the highest form of unforgivable hubris. Yet the universe is an astounding thing; in words attributed to Sir Arthur Eddington, not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. If you doubt that, you've never looked at images from the Hubble Telescope, nor have you read anything about quantum mechanics (I still don't understand it, but what I do understand is astounding). This need not be limited to the present, by no means. Geology and paleontology have shed light on the distant past, unveiling an amazing story much greater than any Flood myth (whichever one you might fancy). A world before humans saw creatures ranging from the trilobite to the tyrannosaur to brontotheres, gigantic insects and great sail-backed reptiles--all long before even the first hominid stepped down out of a tree! The great engines of plate tectonics brought the continents together and broke them apart again, and neither evolution nor plate tectonics have stopped their ceaseless work. Watching this process unfold is awe-inspiring:

 

To think that people can say science is boring blows my mind. Tell me that you aren't amazed by the fact that some of the same information still in our DNA was in the first organisms that crawled out of the sea onto the land; tell me that you aren't amazed that the matter that makes up our bodies was formed when stars in the early universe died, sending out the elements that compose our physical bodies. Tell me you aren't amazed that the work of science has stamped out smallpox across the world, a disease that was once the scourge of humanity; tell me you aren't amazed that we are very close to doing the same to polio! Science has revealed not a universe that has been impoverished by its separation from the old myths of the Norse and the Greeks, one diminished because we are not its sole purpose. Instead, the world we live in and the universe that we inhabit is one that has been magnified by science, found to be more wonderful than we could possibly imagine, and one of the true joys of this existence is learning about the world we live in and watching science uncover still more of it, as we dig deeper into our past and simultaneously set out to the stars.