When I was in graduate school, I spent some time as a teaching assistant. One of the classes I taught was the laboratory session for a basic Physics class that was a requirement for people majoring in Education. I had several interesting experiences while teaching those classes.

I always felt that whoever had put together the series of lab experiments did an outstanding job of overcoming the “first lab session” problem. The lab sessions started the same week as the lectures, occasionally as soon as the same day as the first class session. The goal was to use the lab to reinforce the concepts that had been covered earlier in the lecture, so the first lab was always a difficult problem.

In the first lab the only equipment we used were meter-sticks (yes, we used metric) and rubber balls. The students would drop the ball from different heights and measure how far they bounced back up. They were then to plot the results, with the drop height on the x-axis of a graph and the bounce height on the y-axis. To get technical, the drop height was the independent variable, and the bounce height was the dependent variable. To complete the lab the students had to predict how high the ball would bounce from a given height, and they were to call me to observe their verification of their hypothesis.

In other words, they made a series of observations, analyzed the data, and made a prediction about the future based upon the data and the trend they saw in the data. The fundamental lesson was the scientific method along with a powerful example of the predictive power arising from the scientific method.

Technology arises out of this predictive power of science. My job is in the semiconductor industry, performing research on new structures and materials to make transistors, the switches that are the heart of computers, smaller and faster. We rely on science to predict how materials and structures will behave, and the behavior must be reproducible, otherwise, nothing would work.

Science says nothing of things that cannot be measured because in those cases predictions are impossible.

Put simply and straightforward, science does not refute God in any of the many forms humanity has chosen to conceive the inconceivable.

This is why the attitude of fundamentalist Christians towards the theory of evolution baffles me.

Science merely seeks to explain how things occur.

Science does not try to explain why.

Science does not refute God.

Yet, many who claim to follow God try to destroy science, despite the myriad benefits of technology arising from science that they enjoy every day.

Perhaps one day I will understand, but today I do not.

Neither science nor those who practice it are perfect. No theory explains everything, and the universe is too complex to predict every event to perfect precision.

This is not a failure of science, this shows the limitations inherent in how things work.

A model complex enough to exactly simulate the universe and make predictions with perfect accuracy would be as large as the universe itself.

Those advocating “intelligent design” insist upon this perfection, otherwise, science in their eyes is inadequate according to the “refutations” they try to present, even though they do not impose this same requirement upon themselves.

Science and faith can coexist. True science does not repudiate faith, and true faith does not repudiate science.

Far too many try to replace science with faith when they do not overlap.

Are their beliefs so frail that they must destroy anything they perceive is not in perfect alignment?

Technorati Tags: evolution, intelligent design, science, science & technology, science and technology

Voice of America has a program called Night Line Africa targeted at Africa and hosted by a man who calls himself “Uncle Ted” though his real name is Ted Roberts. He uses an interesting patter when he links together different parts of the show, with repetition and rhythm I have never encountered in radio programs. He uses a “Night Train” metaphor with a clip of whom I believe is James Brown saying, “All aboard… the night train!”

I listen to the show over the Internet, streaming it from KCRW. One of the segments is “Uncle Ted’s voice-mail” where people call in and leave messages. The vast majority of calls are from people in different nations of Africa asking for relatives who left for the United States to telephone them at the phone number they leave in their message.

It is quite poignant, with people seeking their mothers or siblings who often have not been heard from for years.

I wonder how often their calls are heard by those they seek.

Technorati Tags: random thoughts

Advice that talks about more than what is in the words used:

Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.
   -Will Rogers

It’s getting rather hot around here, isn’t it?