Tag Archives: astronomy

Short and stout

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Bertrand Russell famously said that if he stated that there was a teapot circling the Sun, nobody could prove him wrong, and that this was exactly the same as saying, without proof, that a god existed:

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time”

Or as Carl Sagan put it more succinctly “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

Note that Russell was writing exactly 60 years ago, and so could happily include in his argument that the teapot was “too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes”. Sixty years on and we have massively stronger telescopes. Well, ok, he could certainly still say that the telescopes wouldn’t see a small teapot wandering through space between Earth and Mars, but a medium-sized teapot?

Telescopes can see almost back to the Big Bang, see the earliest stars and galaxies that formed. Can see the tiniest perturbations in the rings of Saturn, tiny colour differences on Mercury, changing seasons on Titan. Billions of galaxies can be seen, black holes in abundance, nebulae, distant planets circling different stars, every phenomenon of the universe. Can see every small rock and sandstorm on the surface of Mars, can see where the ice melts in Summer. Can look at details of the surface of asteroids, of comets, of lumps of rock that whizz past Earth. Can do experiments on our own Moon and see the results. Can analyse in detail the surface of the Sun, describe the history of other stars.

Telescopes can view the universe not just in the visible light spectrum, but in infrared, UV, XRay, radio waves. Can see where the “dark matter” is, can “weigh” galaxies, estimate the size of black holes. Can see the echoes of the big bang in the cosmic background radiation. Can see the arrangement of the universe in local groups of galaxies and in the super groupings.

The detail in our description of the universe is now quite astonishing. And nowhere in all that is there a sign of a teapot. Not a big one or a little one. Oh, and no sign of a fellow with a white beard and flowing robes either. Nor tall skinny gods or short stout ones. Nor any of the other imaginary elephants or buddhas or rainbow serpents. No imaginary figures, unless of course they are hiding in a sunken cave on Mars, or under the frozen surface of Titan, or shyly peeping from behind the dust clouds in a nebula, or popping in and out of a black hole in the middle of a galaxy, or, well, you get the idea. No one out there.

For the religious, like homeopaths, the less you can see the greater the proof, until the point where absolute zero evidence equals absolute certainty. So I guess they have it now – whatever the size of the telescope, or all the other devices with which we see the universe, the evidence for teapots, sorry, gods, is zero, zip, zilch, nada, nothing. Them gods ain’t nowhere man.

Nor is the teapot.

Ground control to Major David

by Education, politics • Tags: , ,

I have been having an out of this world experience this week. Well, two really, but one was caused by a nasty dose of flu which came out of nowhere, out of a clear blue sky like an alien spaceship, infecting me, experimentally, with some germ that has never been known on Earth before. Or perhaps it was just man flu. Anyway, while I was laid low by this vicious virus I came across one of those internet projects that make you have some vestige of hope in a world which otherwise seems full of suicide bombers and murderers and celebrity news about Charlie Sheen. It’s called “Galaxy Zoo” and 250,000 people have so far taken part, helping to classify the millions of images of galaxies from the Hubble space telescope. You don’t need any qualifications, just a computer and a pair of eyes, and an ability to recognise unusual patterns (which is why it can’t be done by computer). It becomes, I warn you, completely addictive.

A galaxy, like our own Milky Way Galaxy is a collection of stars held together in a cluster by gravity. Millions, billions of stars (our own galaxy has some 200 billion stars), in each galaxy, and there are millions, probably billions of galaxies in the universe. The Hubble has already taken images of millions of galaxies, everything ranging for the simple elliptical clusters to the beautiful swirls of the spiral galaxies, and many weird and wonderful ones in between. The classification job, which is immense, will help us to understand more about the numbers of different types of galaxy and their evolution over the last 13 billion years or so, and there is always the possibility of finding something completely new (many galaxies the volunteers work on haven’t been seen by human eyes before), like a cloud of mysterious blue gas discovered by one volunteer, which is still the object of scientific examination.

I think this is one of those cooperative ventures by unpaid volunteers, like so many community activities, which give the lie to those jaundiced views of human nature that nothing is worth doing unless it makes money, no one will do anything except for money, and people will never cooperate in this dog-eat-dog super competitive world. And yet, unpaid volunteers everywhere, doing things that transcend everyday life.

I also think this is one of those ventures that should be compulsory for all new elected politicians, part of the “getting to know the parliament” induction process they go through. Partly for that sense that cooperative work is still possible in Australia (and indeed world wide) and it is a good feeling to take part in it. Partly because you are undertaking a process in which you are looking at images obtained by the most astonishing piece of human technology, a symbol of what we can do when we are on our best behaviour, and what we can do when our scientists and engineers are allowed to work on projects that don’t directly make a lot of money. But mainly because seeing, for the first time, a cluster of 200 billion stars billions of light years from here, and then another, and then another, gives an astonishing sense of the size of the universe and our tiny place in it.

And that might, just might, give politicians a sense of perspective and a sense of humility and a sense that we had better learn to cooperate, because it is a big lonely universe outside our little planet. Not much evidence of those qualities in recent times in the zoo of the national parliament.