I’ve been trying to dig up a neat Astronomy quote I semi-remember. So far, no luck. Damn your eyes, google.

Anyway, the quote in question goes something like “Even if mankind lived forever underground in a cave, we would eventually deduce the existence of stars”. Alas, I don’t know who said it. My dad would probably know, I’ll ask him when next I talk to him.

I hope you find the contents of the quotation to be a bit startling, and the images it conjures of some half-mad subterranean “astronomer” scribbling away at his workbench and coming up with the notion of lights in the “sky” to be sufficiently romantic. It turns out that the reasons we can deduce stars without seeing them is that stars are a necessary component of any universe that contains us, or, more precisely, a necessary component of any universe that contains more than three elements in its periodic table. You want atoms heavier than lithium? You need crushing gravities and nuclear reactions.

This is, of course, the part of the post where I talk about Creationism.

If God zapped us into being 10,000 years ago, along with the stars themselves and the light from them in already transit (otherwise the most distant heavenly bodies we could see would be a mere 10,000 light years away. That’s 1/10th the diameter of our galaxy. Talk about “dark skies”), then our ability to deduce (among other things) stars from the chemical evidence alone would be lost.

If I found out I’ve been living in a universe where I am not literally made up of “the dust of stars”, I’d feel poorer for it. Of course, I’m sure someone could counter that being specifically created by an tri-omni supreme being adds a certain degree of panache to the human story.

But enough about that.

This week I’ve been sitting in on a class where the prof regularly makes controversial statements about certain aspects of computer science. It so happens that I’ve heard most of these controversial ideas before, and tend to think there’s some merit in them. Thus, I was able to split my time between listening to the lecture and watching the reactions of the upper-year students around me. They were listening to someone present “strange” ideas on what they’d spent several years being taught about, and I could tell from their body language that for most of them it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Why do we react with hostility to new ideas? I don’t mean that as some kind of dour moral judgment on “closed-minded folks”; quite the opposite: watching a room-full of bright, educated people tensing up at ideas that were new and different made me realize we need to cut the human race some serious slack in this matter.

I think our suspicion of new ideas is actually a pretty good survival trait. You can see see this tendency magnified in horses, for example. Horses are afraid of anything they’ve not seen before. It’s a simple principle: whatever is familiar is safe, if only because it hasn’t killed me yet. It’s this new stuff I have to worry about.

On the other hand, ideas can’t hurt me.

The key to overcoming this sort of survival instinct is probably something along the lines of “Education”. ‘Course, overriding survival instincts isn’t always the safest thing to do. I’m reminded of the old Greek story about the philosopher who was so busy gazing upwards in contemplation that he didn’t watch where he was going and fell into an open pit.

Here’s a quote by a famous physicist that I can remember:

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
~Albert Einstein.

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