Things I wish President Obama Knew pt. 4
Hidden Miracles
“Is the package ready to go?” Bob asked as he entered the room frantically. “This is it, we are go for liftoff.” Bob, as leader of the Life on Mars project often had Type A executives suggesting he needed Ritalin. But how often do you get to spend hundreds of millions of dollars preparing to create life on another planet? For all practical purposes, Bob was about to become the god of Phobos, a small moon of Mars. If this experiment did indeed work, it would result in the spreading of life from our planet to Mars using much the same processes thought to have occurred in the exogenesis hypothesis of Earth’s own creation story.
Arthur C. Clarke once stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But this is not the only role of magic in scientific endeavors. Often, hypotheses are chosen that include reliance on a miracle. An example is panspermia or exogenesis, two closely-related stories used to explain the origin of man. According to these fables, life on Earth resulted from seeds sent from another planet or universe. Exogenesis has in it the idea of someone deliberately sending the seeds to Earth, and panspermia embodies the more general notion that life is spread throughout the universe on asteroids or other interplanetary travelers and occasionally collides with a habitable environment where it can flourish. Both of these concepts have hidden miracles when it comes to the origin of mankind. Sure, they push the chain of events back by explaining how life on Earth began, but then the next question becomes, how did the life on the asteroid or distant planet begin? Same miracle required, just once removed.
In science, we should treat miracles much the same way that mathematicians deal with the concept of infinity. They try to constrain their conversation to those areas where no invocation of infinity is required. While they have developed some ability to convert equations containing an infinite term into modified equations that do not; in general, an infinite equation yields a particularly unsatisfying end. The most widely known attempt to deal with these hidden miracles in science is Occam’s razor. One way to state Occam’s razor is that if one explanation requires a miracle and the other doesn’t, use the simpler hypothesis that doesn’t require a miracle.
So, I propose a corollary to Occam’s razor, Harvey’s Law, that if two theories both have to rely on a hidden miracle, then both are equally likely to be true (or false) because the miracle in either case is “infinitely” improbable and non-reproducible and, therefore, untestable by science.
There are those who will try to distinguish between classes of miracles and assign various measures of likelihood to them. This, too, has a parallel in the mathematical treatment of infinity where sometimes we can say that a certain term in an equation will become constant, hopefully zero, in the limit because the denominator is growing towards infinity faster than the numerator. But, in reality, this is another case where science and mathematics differ. Since science can only disprove things, never prove them, judging between classes of hidden miracles is hopeless and better left to theologians than scientists.
In these cases, the only role left to the scientist is to uncover the hidden miracles contained in competing theories and move that area of research out of the realm of science altogether. People who go beyond this and cling to one explanation over another are better regarded as priests than scientists.
Bob’s quest to become the God of Mars is interesting, but even if we prove panspermia is possible because some forms of living organisms can survive the rigors of space travel, we have only pushed the hidden miracle back in the process. We are still not any closer to explaining the origin of life for, while there could have been a nearly infinite number of migrations from planet to planet throughout our universe, we still have to ask, eventually, where did life begin?
“Is the package ready to go?” Bob asked as he entered the room frantically. “This is it, we are go for liftoff.” Bob, as leader of the Life on Mars project often had Type A executives suggesting he needed Ritalin. But how often do you get to spend hundreds of millions of dollars preparing to create life on another planet? For all practical purposes, Bob was about to become the god of Phobos, a small moon of Mars. If this experiment did indeed work, it would result in the spreading of life from our planet to Mars using much the same processes thought to have occurred in the exogenesis hypothesis of Earth’s own creation story.
Arthur C. Clarke once stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But this is not the only role of magic in scientific endeavors. Often, hypotheses are chosen that include reliance on a miracle. An example is panspermia or exogenesis, two closely-related stories used to explain the origin of man. According to these fables, life on Earth resulted from seeds sent from another planet or universe. Exogenesis has in it the idea of someone deliberately sending the seeds to Earth, and panspermia embodies the more general notion that life is spread throughout the universe on asteroids or other interplanetary travelers and occasionally collides with a habitable environment where it can flourish. Both of these concepts have hidden miracles when it comes to the origin of mankind. Sure, they push the chain of events back by explaining how life on Earth began, but then the next question becomes, how did the life on the asteroid or distant planet begin? Same miracle required, just once removed.
In science, we should treat miracles much the same way that mathematicians deal with the concept of infinity. They try to constrain their conversation to those areas where no invocation of infinity is required. While they have developed some ability to convert equations containing an infinite term into modified equations that do not; in general, an infinite equation yields a particularly unsatisfying end. The most widely known attempt to deal with these hidden miracles in science is Occam’s razor. One way to state Occam’s razor is that if one explanation requires a miracle and the other doesn’t, use the simpler hypothesis that doesn’t require a miracle.
So, I propose a corollary to Occam’s razor, Harvey’s Law, that if two theories both have to rely on a hidden miracle, then both are equally likely to be true (or false) because the miracle in either case is “infinitely” improbable and non-reproducible and, therefore, untestable by science.
There are those who will try to distinguish between classes of miracles and assign various measures of likelihood to them. This, too, has a parallel in the mathematical treatment of infinity where sometimes we can say that a certain term in an equation will become constant, hopefully zero, in the limit because the denominator is growing towards infinity faster than the numerator. But, in reality, this is another case where science and mathematics differ. Since science can only disprove things, never prove them, judging between classes of hidden miracles is hopeless and better left to theologians than scientists.
In these cases, the only role left to the scientist is to uncover the hidden miracles contained in competing theories and move that area of research out of the realm of science altogether. People who go beyond this and cling to one explanation over another are better regarded as priests than scientists.
Bob’s quest to become the God of Mars is interesting, but even if we prove panspermia is possible because some forms of living organisms can survive the rigors of space travel, we have only pushed the hidden miracle back in the process. We are still not any closer to explaining the origin of life for, while there could have been a nearly infinite number of migrations from planet to planet throughout our universe, we still have to ask, eventually, where did life begin?
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