Science and Nature

I've never understood people who say that science takes the joy out of things ... as if somehow understanding the mechanism behind a phenomenon takes away its power and beauty. I find that understanding the science behind nature adds substantially to my appreciation.

First, let's start with the basics. What are we actually interacting with when we experience nature?

Well, the human body evolved a number of ways of transmitting information about the outside world to our conscious brain. These senses are abstractions. We do not generally experience 'the real world', we experience a filtered version of it.

Let's start with something simple, like temperature.

Temperature: When we feel heat or cold, what we're experiencing is the energy level of the gas particles that are striking against our skin. We don't experience the individual sensation of each particle hitting us; our nervous system summarizes and abstracts the data. If the temperature is sufficiently hot or cold, we may also experience pain -- which is the sensation of damage being done to our body.

A much complicated sense is vision, which defines how we experience the world more than any other sense.

Vision: When we see things with our vision, we're seeing a heavily filtered version of reality. The lens in our eyes focuses photons onto the photoreceptive cells in our retina, which are then transmitted into our neural network. Our photoreceptive cells only gather data on a limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum. These signals are heavily processed by our nervous system -- but are quickly made available to our conscious mind. We don't see the individual photons. We see a shifting panorama of color, texture and hue. Our brain is wired to pay particular changes to things that are out of place, as measured against our expectations, which are established by paradigms, which have been created out of the experiences and social interactions to that point in our lives.

This is a long and complicated way of saying: Our eyes detect some of the photons that strike us, our nervous system turns that into a 'movie' of sorts, and then our brain filters out most of that and focuses our attention on the parts it thinks are important. This all happens (nearly) instantaneously, entirely outside of our conscious awareness.

But I'm dancing around the crux of the issue, which is that we experience things on a macro (non quantum mechanical) level. This is particularly noticeable when we come to the next sense ...

Touch: When we feel the experience of touch, we are primarily experiencing the aggregate sensation of the electron cloud of one group of atoms (the thing we're touching) as it interacts with the electron cloud of the atoms in our skin.

All objects are made of atoms, which have an electron 'cloud' that is quantum mechanical in nature.

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The 'cloud' of electrons in these photos is actually composed of 6 electrons -- two in the inner shell, and four in the outer shell. Due to the nature of quantum mechanics, these electrons are very very very random. They are so random that their exact position and momentum cannot be pinned down. This is not a limitation of our measuring tools, it is a fundamental quality of every object in the universe (this quality only becomes obvious on really small objects). In the photo shown above, this randomness can actually be seen as a 'cloud' of electrons -- because the position and momentum of the electrons cannot be accurately measured, they can only be seen as a hazy cloud of objects that are kind of in one place ... kind of in another place ... and, well, kind of in another place at the same time! :)

That's a photo of a single atom. Atoms form together like legos to form molecules, which look like this:



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This is a pentacene molecule, which is composed of 22 carbon and 14 hydrogen atoms.

Every object in our environment is formed from many, many, many of these molecules. Really. It's a staggering amount.

So what we feel when we touch something is the aggregate of the outer electron cloud ... that wispy, ephemeral layer of randomness that can't actually be measured or pinned down (more on this in a moment).

Now, sometimes touching things can cause a chemical reaction ... like when you spill battery acid on your hand. A chemical reaction means that the molcules of your hand are interacting with the molecules of the acid, and they're changing into different molecules. This is a bad thing for a living organism.

Other times we experience a temperature differential (see above), only this time it's caused by touching a solid against another solid (or a liquid). The result is pretty much the same.

The Human Experience: What I find fascinating about this is how distorted our view of the world is. We don't experience the world as it is; our perceptions are heavily altered by our evolved senses.

The primary thing we don't experience is how random and bizarre the universe really is. Our senses act as protective parents, keeping us safe from all that scary knowledge outside our door :)

I'm excited to know that the leaf, the branch, the wisp of air that touches my cheek ... they're all created from the same star stuff. That it's all vibrating and shifting around randomly, twisting and churning in an endless dance ... a silent ballet, hidden from our view by the economizing force of evolutionary adaptation.

But hey, I'm a curious bastard. I can understand the evolutionary value of it all ... but damn it, I still want to see how everything works firsthand :)

This is where science comes in handy.

The most beautiful piece I've ever read on the natural world wasn't written by a poet or a philosopher, it was written by a scientist who saw patterns in the complex web of life.

(I had forgotten what a great opening chapter this is until I reread it recently).

What it comes down to is that the complexity of the living world emerges from (relatively) simple particles and forces. Understanding this doesn't reduce the world to a formula and make it mechanistic, it makes the complexity we see around us all the more miraculous.

(At least in my opinion) there's nothing that presupposes that we'd have to be here, conscious and full of wonder about the world. There's nothing written in the fabric of the universe that makes humans particularly special. What's special is that we're here at all ... what's special is that such brilliant complexity has emerged from very simple patterns.

We can't see a lot of this with our senses, but we can begin to understand it with our conscious minds. This adds to, rather than subtracts from, the beauty of the natural world.