Judith’s Reading Room Super Saturday

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The Look Everywhere blog’s been pretty quiet lately, so I thought I’d throw up a quick post to prove that I haven’t stopped existing entirely! It’s been mighty busy ’round here, which is always a good thing, but I still try to find time to work with one of my favorite new organizations, Judith’s Reading Room. JRR’s mission is to improve lives and literacy by providing custom libraries to those who lack access to books and reading materials. I met the founders on a photo shoot, and when they called to ask if I would be their official photographer about six months ago I was delighted.

I love the idea behind Judith’s Reading Room, but I’m most impressed with the level of dedication I see in everybody involved. It’s grown a lot in the half-year I’ve known it, and I’ve met so many wonderful people who are only too excited to help in any way they can. The founders have been tireless in coordinating events and making themselves known in the community, and I think that is hugely important in getting a new organization.

A few weeks ago was a milestone event, the Super Saturday Book Drive at the SteelStacks in Bethlehem. I love shooting at the SteelStacks, and this was a lot of fun. Judith’s Reading Room reached their target donations quickly, and members of the community were eager to show their support. Children were treated to books read aloud by local celebrity storytellers, including Stacey Stauffer, Eve Tannery, and Eva Grayzel. It was a lot of fun.

Anyway, enough chit-chat; here are a few pictures!

So that’s it for today! I’ll make my best effort to get a few more posts in before the end of summer, but I can’t make any promises!

Why religion gets me so crazy:

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I’ve been known to write a few incendiary posts here, but it’s my blog and I’ll do as I do. I’m not going to apologize for having said the things that I’ve said, even if I’ve offended some people. But I will apologize for the tone in which I’ve said them because I genuinely believe in maintaining an open-hearted, kind dialog. Even with the people who most strongly disagree with me.

It isn’t always easy. I’ll pull out the old soapbox for any number of reasons, but religion is too hard for me to resist. They say you shouldn’t ever talk about politics or religion, and it’s probably true that you shouldn’t. But it’s also true that I probably always will. I always say that your faith is your temple, and I have no reason to tear that down. It’s true. I don’t really care what you believe, as long as you don’t ask me to believe it, too.

‘Cos here’s the thing:

If you want to see people do funny things with their faces, tell them you’re an atheist. Feigned politeness forces itself into the place that was once occupied by a genuine smile. They won’t know immediately whether to pity you or scorn you, but they’ll quickly muster the confidence to judge everything about the way your life turned out. Maybe you’d have a full-time job if you would just trust in god. Maybe you’d have some savings, maybe a wife. Maybe your parents might have stayed together. Maybe you just wouldn’t be so broken.

Knowing that these sentiments are just around the corner, I get pretty agitated when the subject of religion comes up. I get pretty angry sometimes.

I’m just tired of feeling marginalized, misunderstood, and stigmatized. And yet, I can almost sympathize, because for a long time I avoided the word like it was poison, preferring less touchy terms like “agnostic” or “irreligious.” In truth, I once detested being called an “atheist,” as though atheists were a bunch of militant assholes who want to piss in your breakfast. Lately, of course, I’ve been realizing that being an atheist isn’t any more complicated than rejecting the unnatural assumption that there’s a god. Maybe you feel like it’s natural to believe in a god. Okay, it is natural—but only in the same way that it’s natural to assume that after you’ve flipped Heads five times in a row you’re “due” to flip Tails.

I’ve had many conversations about religion and irreligion with many people very close to me. Most of them end amiably, but some of them end up in distraught frenzies of panic and fear. Sometimes it’s fear for me, my soul, or my afterlife. Sometimes it’s fear for society in general. Sometimes the other person will fear for him- or herself. It’s as though they think when I say “Yes, thanks, I am an atheist,” what I really mean to say is “Oh no, don’t worry about a thing. Behind these cunning eyes is a degenerate cesspool of violence and lawlessness.” Or perhaps it’s “I want to fill your children’s heads with immorality and disregard for right and wrong.” It might even be “I consider you to be stupid because of your religious convictions.”

None of this is true, of course. What I really mean to say is “Yes, thanks, I’m an atheist.”

At which point my well-intentioned conversational partner will invariably try to convince me that god is the logical conclusion to any meaningful soul-searching. When I don’t buy it, they call me close-minded, hostile, aggressive, dishonest, or manipulative. I don’t consider myself close-minded, of course, but then who really does? I don’t consider it close-minded to reject an assumption founded on nothing other than the possibility that a non-observable, non-measurable, non-falsifiable, non-influence-able entity might exist entirely outside the realm of scientific discovery. If you say there’s a polar bear in the room, it’s up to you to show it to me. It doesn’t make me close-minded if I don’t take your word for it.

And despite my overwhelming desire to see everything logically and scientifically, I have always been very accommodating of theistic philosophies. There was a time that I identified as a Christian (although admittedly it didn’t last long and it was punctuated by enormous disbelief). I’ve generally been very sympathetic to Christians, as well. I know a lot of them, and I really don’t have a whole lot of bad things to say about the lot of them. But it astounds me how close-minded some Christians can be, even while professing that they accept everybody.

When you say things like, “I respect all religions, but…” I know that you’re about to say something disagreeable. When you say, “I respect Muslims, but a mosque might attract terrorists,” you’re really saying “I neither understand nor trust Muslims, and that’s okay as long as they stay out of my sight.” When you say, “It’s okay for people to follow any religion, but I just don’t trust atheists,” you’re really saying, “Atheists frighten me because I haven’t been exposed to them enough.”

When you ask, “But how can atheists have morality when they don’t believe in anything?” it seems to me that you’re really saying, “The only reason I behave morally is because I believe in God; otherwise I’d do bad things.”

And by the way, atheists believe in plenty of things, none of which rely on faith alone.

I got 99 beliefs, but the Bible ain't one.

So yes, perhaps I did react a bit strongly when I learned about HR535. I’ve been somewhat harsh in my treatment of the subject before, too. And for some of the sharper edges of my reactions, I apologize. But I stand firmly by what I said. The time our elected officials spent passing The Year of the Bible is time they should have spent upholding the Constitution. Time they should have spent fighting for equality and freedom, the values on which America is really founded. If you took my reaction as an attack on the Bible, or on Christianity, I am very sorry to hear that. It was an attack on misguided legislature. Would I have reacted so vehemently to idiotic legislature taking some other form? Maybe not. But only because as an atheist, I am absolutely tired of being perceived as a second-class citizen, somebody who just needs a little dose of the Good Book.

HR535 may make Christians feel better (though not all—see Amy Sondova’s excellent response to my post on the subject), it alienates those of us for whom the Bible is not sacred. Such legislature can make people of any faith who do not uphold the Bible feel “wrong.” It implies that the Bible can give us strength as a state. It’s true, the Bible can give many people strength and comfort. But to say that the reason we don’t have strength and comfort is because we lack Biblical understanding is a little bit too forceful for my tastes.

My friend Staniel argued that it’s good to acknowledge something that’s had such a strong influence on our culture, and that even if you don’t believe it to be the word of God you can still learn from the Bible. He questioned whether I would have reacted so violently to news that the House had named 2012 the Year of Science. Well, no, I wouldn’t have. One, because no Constitutional clause demands the separation of Science and State (although to hear climate deniers and ultra-conservative pundits you might think the separation exists anyway). Two, because I freely admit to wanting more science in the public sphere. But ultimately, I wouldn’t react strongly because “Science” doesn’t exclude anybody whereas Christianity does. Like it or not, Christianity is an exclusive club in which a majority of Americans are members.

It’s true that there are many Christians I love and respect. I don’t think any less of them because of their beliefs. My friend Amy, who is in many ways a role model for me, is a devout Christian and is very open-minded and intelligent. Her blog, Backseat Writer, has a great tone, and I read it to remind myself to be less abrasive!

At the same time, of course, I feel that in my small corner of reality, I need to defend science and atheism against things like The Year of the Bible. Not because I see HR535 as inherently threatening, but because atheists always get brushed aside. Atheists start the race a few laps behind. We don’t need a Year of the Bible any more than we need a Year of Upper-Middle-Class White Males. Christians in the media love to paint themselves as persecuted, but the reality is that atheists are far more reviled in our culture than Christians ever have been. Don’t believe me? Slap on a scarlet letter and let me know how it works out for you.

Now, I’m going to try to keep the atheist rhetoric to a minimum here. It’s really not something I’m particularly interested in writing about. I do it because I have to. It doesn’t make me feel good to write about religion because I just don’t care about religion.

I love to write about science, photography, and the observable universe. I love to write about how beautiful the world around us is. I love to share my photography with you. That makes me feel really good, so I’ll try to stick with that from now on. I’m not making any promises, but I’ll try. But just you go and try to start up with the same tired arguments against science and I’ll get right back to it. And next time I’m going to be really angry.

PS—As I was writing this, I saw on Slate a re-post of a Financial Times article about atheism in America. It’s too short to really get into the nuances of the competing belief systems at play (even among different brands of atheism) but it is a good read, and I encourage anybody who can’t trust an atheist to take a look.

On figures

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It always gets me to see people follow a (usually made-up) rule to the letter. Like the wisdom that any number less then a certain value should be written out, while higher values should use figures. Seven apples might be sufficient, but add a few more and you get 11. Now, the official rule is that they ought to be written similarly. There’s a lot of grey area, though. What if you’ve got to choose between seven bushels or three hundred sixty six apples?

I say all numbers greater than 10 should be written in scientific notation from now on. You can have 7 apples or 1.1 × 101 apples. Trust me, it’ll be easier in the long run. It’ll be useful for everything from describing your favorite movie (an adventure 6.5 × 106 years in the making!) to your annual gross income (over $4 × 104).

There’s an auxiliary benefit, to be had from such a system, too! Scientific notation can be puzzling for people who haven’t been exposed to it, so if we teach our kids to use it on a daily basis they will express the proper awe and admiration when scientists describe a point in the history of the Universe that happened 10-37 seconds after the Big Bang. It was a very short time.

So, if you’ve got any questions about it, I’ll see you at 1.176 × 103 Main Street!

The YEAR OF THE BIBLE?? WHAT THE———??

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I’ve been trying really hard to stay civil on this blog. I want ever so desperately for Look Everywhere to be a celebration of all the glorious, beautiful good that surrounds us. As a photographer, I can’t help but see love at every turn.

But as a scientist, I can’t help but to get pissed off at HR 535. Pennsylvania House Resolution 545 officially declares 2012 “The Year of the Bible.” Go ahead and read it. It’s short and sweet. I’ve been literally pacing and sputtering for the last hour, and I can’t even put my finger on which part of this whole farce is the worst offender.

The bill is really “only” symbolic, in that it doesn’t have any real substance behind it. It’s there to help Christians feel better about the recession, and all the other things that they feel are wrong with the United States. But when exactly did we give our government the power to officially recognize one holy book over the others? If we allow this foolishness now, next year our elected officials might take it upon themselves to insert the Bible into state-funded curricula—you know, so the children have a more positive upbringing.

The implication, of course, is that those who do not believe the Bible to be the One and Only Truth of the Universe are understood to be less moral, or at least in need of a good schooling. That includes Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, Native Americans, and of course my friends the atheists, who feel they are capable of making responsible decisions for themselves and their offspring without asking permission from an otherworldly being.

The implication is that the Bible is the source of our morality, our community, and our justice system, and that without the Bible we will surely disintegrate into a lawless wasteland. As we’ve obviously been doing this whole time. We already know prayer works; just ask Rick Perry.

The implication is that the government can pick and choose its own belief system, and that ought to work for everybody. The implication is that next year, they can declare it the Year of the Koran. And then the Year of the White Album. And then the Year of Penn and Teller: Bullshit! Well, at least that would be amusing…

So yeah, I understand that Pennsylvania House Resolution 545 is “only” a symbolic measure. But it’s symbolic of more than just a misguided reliance on a bronze-age storybook. It’s symbolic of a government that is telling us – US! its own people! – that we don’t know how to handle our personal lives. You Christians should be getting nervous, too, because you’re on a wire. This means you, Staniel. Your Bible isn’t as securely-rooted into American culture as you think.

When you let this ridiculousness slip into your government, you’re giving the government the power to control your personal life. Sure, maybe it’s on your side now—but do you really trust a government of your peers that much? Do you really want to give it the power to pick the Official Holy Book of the Year? Sure, the majority of Americans identify as Christians. That does not make the United States of America a Christian nation. The majority of Americans are also of Caucasian descent, but that does not make America a “white” nation, either. Women, by a very slim majority, outnumber men, but that does not make America a “female” nation.

America is not a Christian nation.

The implication is that not one of the 193 spineless, shameless, lawless representatives of Pennsylvania thought it might be a good idea to uphold the Constitution instead of allowing this worthless piece of bum fluff pass. The implication is that it’s Okay to misinterpret our nation’s laws and history, as long as it makes a few voters feel warm and fuzzy inside.

The Bible is not factual. It is not a history text. It is not a founding document. And the Bible is most certainly not law.

It may seem harmless, but only because it hasn’t had the chance to chip away at the armor of reason for long enough. 2012 is not the Year of the Bible, and in America, it never will be. Please, sign the petition to remove this from Pennsylvania’s law books. If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, just remember—it’s our liberty today, but it’ll be yours tomorrow. If you do live in Pennsylvania, contact your representatives to ask them how they could have forgotten everything they learned in law school.

More Reading:
The Official Document
A writeup from The Raw Story
A writeup from the Freedom From Religion Foundation

And tell me how you feel about it! Do you think I’m overreacting? Do you think I’m not reacting strongly enough? Atheists and believers alike, I want to hear from you! Rant and rave in the comments—but keep it respectful. Bible-slap me on Facebook or Hitchslap me on Twitter. And sign that petition!

Update, 2012-02-03:

In my zeal to publish this quickly (this post was written faster than any other blog post I’ve ever written, even posts that are only a paragraph—seriously) I missed my main point! See what happens when you check reason at the door?

My biggest complaint with HR535 is the second line, where it describes the Bible as the “Word of God.” Um. What. You mean to tell me that a year from now somebody scouring the books for a legal precedent in his domestic abuse case will now have the full weight of the law on his side? Excuse me, but the Bible is not the “Word of God,” and we cannot treat it as though it is!

Okay, I’m going to let that speak for itself.

Image of the Day, The Girl in 48 Edition

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I just think my fiancée’s really pretty, that’s all!

And I like her style! We had just stopped in a local diner for their incongruously delicious coconut pancakes before venturing out to break in her new snowboard. We hopped into an unoccupied section of the restaurant to steal a few photos and take advantage of the afternoon light pouring in through the window.

Whenever you see good light, don’t waste it!

Kepler announces 26 new planets

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That NASA’s Kepler mission should discover some new planets isn’t really news at this point. The Kepler observatory is designed, after all, to do just that. At the end of last year it had discovered a total of 2,326 potential exoplanets – extrasolar planets. They’re potential because they require some pretty time-intensive confirmation.

Astronomers use Kepler to finely measure the total light output of tens of thousands of stars. The stars appear to dim briefly every once in a while, but only by a barely-perceptible amount. It’s not enough to cause them to twinkle (our atmosphere is responsible for the scintillation of the heavens, you know), but it is measurable, and often, it’s the same amount.

A likely possibility in the case of periodic dimmings and brightenings is that a planet is crossing in front of its star (from our perspective). This June, in fact, you’ll be able to observe a planetary transit right in our own neighborhood, as Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. And you better try to catch it in June, too, because you won’t have another chance until 2117. So each dimming of a star is tallied as a potential planet. Then we just wait until the suspect passes in front of the star again, completing its orbit.

Most of the planets that Kepler has confirmed have short-period orbits: they don’t take very long to complete a revolution. The Kepler mission hasn’t yet been in operation for three years, so it’s unsurprising that it hasn’t had time to confirm longer-period planets. After all, in its brief lifetime so far, it wouldn’t have even had a chance to confirm Earth as a planet!

To confirm a planet, astronomers need to take note of a dip in brightness that could be explained by a transiting body. Then they wait until it does it again, and measure the time it takes. Then they wait the same amount of time to see if it does it again. If it passes those tests, you’ve got a planet. Naturally, it takes time to do it, as well as a considerable amount of effort to interpret the data. It isn’t nearly as simple a process as this summary would make it seem like. But, it’s NASA’s job to figure out how to do that. My job is only to marvel at how awesome the universe is.

The bit that caught my attention in this press release, however, is the bit about how astronomers are growing far more competent at quickly establishing the orbits of multi-planet systems. If we were to take our own solar system as an example, we’d find that only a handful of our planets, the interior rocky ones, are easy to study based on their orbits alone.  Mercury revolves around the sun about four times while we complete one revolution; in the three years Kepler has been at work we could have built up a substantial file on it had we been observing it on an alien star.

Neptune, distant and patient, takes 165 Earth years to complete a revolution. It has been generally assumed that gas giants like Neptune and its cousins Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter are the most prevalent planets in the galaxy. To date, we have discovered more gas giants than small rocky planets like Earth. However, gas giants have been easier to detect with less advanced methods. New data (including data from Kepler) is beginning to paint a different picture. More rocky planets are being discovered using some very complex techniques, and in fact, the rate of discovery exceeds that for gas giants.

Of course, that isn’t the whole picture, either. Even with Jupiter’s relatively modest year of eleven Earth years, it could be a while before anybody spotted it transiting the sun. Far out planets like Neptune might never be observed in our lifetimes. So when astronomers estimate that there are about 160 billion planets in our galaxy it isn’t because they’ve meticulously counted each one (though not for lack of trying). It’s a statistical estimate that, like many in the world of astronomy, is subject to revision as we obtain more data.

An artist's depiction of Kepler 16b, circling two suns. From NASA.

But wait, how do scientists know the mass and composition of a planet, anyway? You guessed it: complex measurements. By measuring the amount of light that a planet blocks, scientists can calculate its volume. The really tricky part is measuring the wobble of a star as the planet tugs on it  back and forth. Just like the Moon’s gravity affects our  tides here on Earth, our gravity affects the Sun (although only very minutely). By measuring the influence of a planet on its star, scientists can calculate its mass. Once you know its mass and volume, figuring out its density is the easy part. A small, massive planet is likely made of rock and metal, whereas a large, less dense planet is likely to be a gas giant.

So like I was saying, NASA’s scientists are getting much better at observing planets in a multi-planet system. Using a technique called Transit Timing Variation, astronomers use the differences in timing for each planet’s transit to calculate the gravitational effects of other potential planets; it allows them to quickly and accurately assess how many planets a given star system is hosting. If it sounds complicated, it is. Don’t let this video fool you; I bet it isn’t easy!

A billion other worlds

In case you thought I was going to let that comment about 160 billion planets slide, let me expand on it. Based on data we’ve observed so far, there seems to be about an average of 1.6 planets per star. A conservative estimate suggests that there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but there could be as many as half a trillion. Either way, that’s a lot of planets.

Very few of the planets that Kepler has confirmed so far seem as though they might be hospitable to life as we know it, but the data has only just begun to roll in. Even with just tens of confirmed planets under its belt, the Kepler mission has spotted some truly alien worlds. The planet Kepler 16b (pictured above, courtesy of NASA) circles two stars. The star KIC 12557548 has a planet so close it’s being boiled alive, and KOI 961′s planets’ orbits are only two days long. Other observatories are making similarly weird finds.

We know there are a lot of planets out there, even before we make any estimates. We know of over 750 right now, with more coming in regularly. So, yeah, 160 billion planets in the Milky Way (give or take). And we’re just one galaxy.

For ease of calculations, I just try to remember that there are about 100 billion stars in an average galaxy, and there are about 100 billion galaxies. When I say “about,” however, it must be understood that we really have no idea. Some galaxies contain just a couple tens of millions of stars, and others can contain trillions. Even the number of galaxies has been calculated based on one tiny patch of sky that we happen to be able to see clearly. Either way, when I say there are about ten sextillion stars in the known Universe, I don’t expect anybody to quibble.

Because ten sextillion looks like this: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wouldn’t even know how to handle it if you said I was off by a zero or two, because it’s all the same to me. It’s just a lot of friggin’ stars. You just cannot conceive of this number. Even if you gathered a trillion stars every day it’d still take you 27 million years to collect them all. The odds of you picking the Milky Way out of an enormous Universe-sized hat at random are…well, let’s just say you’re more likely to win the lottery 500 times than to find the Milky Way once.

The incredible vastness of the Universe is really too much to deal with coherently. There is so much out there beyond us, and we haven’t even begun to discover it all. The more I learn about the Universe, the more awestruck I become. That we can find planets so distant the starlight we’re measuring left before we were born is incredible to me.

An alien sunbeam hurtles for countless eons at blistering speeds in an awful, lonesome odyssey through space, a subtle field of nothing punctuated by subtler ripples of invisible forces, until just when it was going to fade into the background it chances to hit a telescope and it gives its life to our imaginations. That’s the wonder of the Universe, and I absolutely adore it.

 

On Creation

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In which I vent, thoroughly.

My brother comes home from work sometimes, frustrated by interminable theological conversations with a co-worker. The only advice I can ever really give him is that he shouldn’t engage a religious person – especially a conservative Christian – in a scientific debate, because it never ends well.

And yet, despite the frequency with which I offer that advice, I fell into the same trap this weekend. I’m not sure how it happened; the conversation was going smoothly until things turned to evolution. A friend (let’s call him Staniel) asserted that evolution is a mere unverified hypothesis, a story outside the realm of science. Science, according to Staniel, is only concerned with measuring velocities and counting pigeons. Everything else is speculation.

Now, I’m fine with people believing what they want to believe. I have no reason to change the things people hold dear, and I’d just exhaust myself if I tried. I just can’t touch faith. It’s a personal matter, and untouchable. But when they deny evidence, reason, and reality, when they misrepresent science, when they use any reason other than pure faith to justify mistaken beliefs, well. That’s when I get going.

Here’s where I vent. If you know where this is headed, you’re excused.

At the core of Staniel’s argument against evolution is the assumption that events before recorded history weren’t, um, recorded, and are therefore speculation. Any event, whether the evolution of species or the origin of the Earth, is either directly observable or it falls outside the scope of human knowledge. The assumption is both ridiculous and illogical.

The standard model of cosmology posits that the Universe is about 13.75 billion years old (give or take), so let’s start there and narrow things down. 13.75 billion years is literally an inconceivable span of time. For a creature who can only expect to live about eighty years, even a million years is impossible to grasp. I’ve talked about this before, and I’ll be talking about it a lot more in future posts. A billion is an outrageous amount of anything.

It’s tough to understand the difference between a million and a billion. It’s only three extra zeroes, after all. It’s insufficient to compare it to the difference between one and 1,000 – although the ratio is the same. 1000 is a conceivable number. We can imagine a thousand of something. Really, we can even imagine a million of something, if we try. We have enough references that thousands and millions are accessible to us. But billions… That’s something else entirely.

Let’s take a few seconds to think about this. Don’t worry; at less than 17 minutes, we won’t even spend 1,000 seconds on this paragraph. A million seconds, on the other hand, 1,000 thousand seconds – that’s twelve days. You can plan a weekend getaway that far in advance. A thousand million seconds later, though, and you’ll be planning your retirement. A billion seconds is almost 32 years. Adding three little zeroes can mean a huge difference, even if the word “billion” doesn’t seem very intimidating by itself.

So I can forgive Staniel his disbelief of the enormity of time. 13.75 billion years is not something we can understand quickly or easily. However, what I cannot forgive is his assertion that because we can’t directly observe 13.75 billion years in action, they must not have happened.

And it was at this point in the conversation that I found myself in the unfortunate position of trying to explain the concept of science while using scientific principles to invalidate nonscientific principles. I find that the highly religious tend not to be impressed by the sublime beauty of scientific discovery, nor the methodologies behind it. At the risk of overgeneralizing, they seem to have a sense that it’s okay to believe whatever you want, and that automatically validates any assertion we make.

That’s wrong.

See, in science, there is no “right” and “wrong.” There is only supported or unsupported by evidence. Hypotheses that fail to gather evidence are rejected by scientists – and nobody is more eager to discredit a long-standing scientific hypothesis than another scientist. Science is vigorously self-critical; that’s what makes it successful. It can only succeed, really, when able minds seek flaws in it. To use the limitations of current scientific knowledge or to describe how science has been wrong in the past to “score a point” against science is both pointless and meaningless.

So no, we don’t “know” that the universe is 13.75 billion years old the way that we “know” whether we’re sitting in a chair or not. But 13.75 billion years is not a magic figure that scientists made up and have been conspiring to force upon us ever since. It may not even be correct. But for now, it’s the best estimate we have calculated, and it’s a number that has been independently substantiated time and again. However, physicists and astronomers are constantly reworking the data and making adjustments.

The scientist who can demonstrate with unimpeachable evidence that the universe is greatly younger or older than 13.75 billion years will have made his or her career. No creationist is as eager to amend scientific thinking as a rigorous scientist. However, as data accumulates, the likelihood that a gaping discrepancy will be discovered grows slimmer and slimmer.

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s move on to the age of the Earth, a deal breaker for sure. Staniel offered his conviction that our only method for measuring the age of the Earth, radiocarbon dating, has resulted in measurements no older than a few thousand years. While it’s true that carbon-14 dating is useless for objects older than around 60,000 years, it’s definitely untrue that carbon-14 is the only method of radiometric dating scientists use.

Staniel alleges that we have only speculation, but in fact we have a great deal of evidence from independent lines, including the study of uranium-rich meteorites and the chemical composition of rocks found on Earth. Again, we don’t “know” the age of the Earth the way we “know” our own birthday. But we do have an ever-increasing and ever more precise body of evidence that establishes a rough age of 4.5 billion years.

4.5 billion is another incredibly large number. If a billion seconds is 32 years, 4.5 billion seconds is 144 years. 144 years ago, we were reeling from a disastrous Civil War. 4.5 billion years, then, is a really long time. Again, I can forgive Staniel for his inability to handle this number. But I can’t forgive his assertion that because nobody was there 4.5 billion years ago it’s just a story scientists tell their kids, and the 6,000 years of the Biblical account is equally valid.

See, throughout the entire conversation, the core of Staniel’s arguments was “But you can’t observe _________, so it’s only speculation.” Which is a disturbing but common argument among the scientifically illiterate. It’s related to the “it’s only a theory” deception. Staniel got annoyed when I spent most of the conversation explaining what constitutes a scientific theory, rather than laboriously picking through each of his flawed assumptions, but he fell into the trap of using words that sound “science-y” without understanding any of the meaning behind it.

Theory does not mean “Any possible explanation regardless of evidence.”

Which is why the story of Noah’s flood is a story, and not a theory. It is not a scientifically-valid theory because it does not match with any currently-accepted models of geology, meteorology, hydrology, or physics, nor does it match the global historical or archaeological record. We have very strong evidence for many flood events, but sorry, there were no global floods.

To which Staniel replied, “But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Which means that if I don’t keep an open mind regarding fictional floods, I’m a narrow-minded goon who with blind faith accepts Science as the almighty, impenetrable truth. Weird, because that’s kind of how bible literalists come off. If absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, where is Staniel’s open mind regarding, say, a Big Bang that we “can’t directly observe” despite overwhelming evidence that there was in fact a Big Bang?

But never mind all that. The Big Bang wasn’t always a part of the standard model of cosmology, so let’s stay on Earth for a little while longer. Staniel again accused me of changing the subject to confuse the debate and thwart his logical refutation of science, so I asked him to provide one fact that dislodged the evidence for a 4.5 billion year old Earth.

If you want to play the game, I’ll play along, but I promise you won’t enjoy it.

He offered that given the Sun’s shrinking diameter – it’s losing about 5 feet of its diameter every hour – it would have eaten the Earth alive 20 million years ago. I guess it’s okay that nobody ever took a measuring tape to the Sun, rendering its diameter unobservable, and therefore mere speculation. Nevertheless, I’ll treat the fact in the spirit in which it was offered – as scientific. However, there is no science that substantiates this claim. The sun’s diameter does indeed shrink in a very small way with time, but it also expands with time. The same is true of the Earth itself, although to a much smaller degree.

On Earth and on the Sun, convection and gravitational forces play a role. The Sun, however, gobbles through millions and millions of tons of matter; its massive gravity sucks matter from the surface to the core, where pressure builds to the point that nuclear fusion happens. This fusion creates enormous amounts of energy, which travels back to the surface and gets ejected as the light and heat that we require to exist. So, in a sense, the Sun does lose mass over time; it should get smaller.

It’s never that simple. The amount of matter the Sun loses to nuclear forces is negligible compared to its mass. 20 million years ago it was pretty much as big as it is now. 20 million years is nothing on an astronomical scale. You could stack up 250 sets of 20 million years before the Sun begins to grow into a red giant star. 5 billion years in the future, Earth’s orbit will be in very serious jeopardy.

Of course, Staniel insists that since we’ve never observed any star from birth to death we have only speculation based on the current state of all the known stars. It’s true that we have only the current state of all known stars, but we know a lot of stars. As I said above, the limits of the body of scientific knowledge do not imply that “science” is useless and that all other stories have equal weight in a debate. Science is a method. It is a way for us to weed out bad information from good. It is a way for us to find the likeliest solution to the questions we have.

It was at this point in the conversation that Staniel excused himself from the conversation, because he can’t be squabbling with me all day. It is frustrating that the conversation ended with him feeling smugly that I am the close-minded one because I refuse to accept every story that comes my way. Stories are wonderful, don’t get me wrong. I love stories, and I appreciate them as fiction. You can even learn a lot from them. The Harry Potter series provides some great role models, but I’m not going to hang on every word Dumbledore utters.

Fiction is fiction, and it doesn’t matter how old it is or how inspiring you find it. The epic of Gilgamesh does not provide scientific evidence that immortality is possible. The Odyssey does not provide historical proof of the existence of cyclopean giants. Twilight does not prove that vampires sparkle.

I’m sure you’ll take me at my word when I say I could go on, but instead I’ll end it here: if the only scientifically-valid evidence is that which we can directly observe, where are the observations of a god? And if you say, “All around us,” I’ll probably punch you. The universe is an enormous, terrible, subtle place of beauty. To try to conceive of processes that happen over billions of years is mind-blowing. The reality is so much more beautiful than any ham-fisted attempt to sum it all up in one week of majestic conjuring.

There is popular (and clever) quote attributed to the poet Francis Thompson— “An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.” But O, what a beautiful accident we are!

2012-01-26 Correction: I misattributed the above quote by Francis Thompson to Francis Watson. Freudian slip?? —J

 

How to Count a Thousand Photographs

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Just for fun, since it’s a new year, I thought I’d take a look at just how many pictures I took last year. I have all of 2011 archived onto the same hard drive, so I did a quick search to filter for the original RAW files (to cut out duplicates and data files). Turns out I snapped the shutter 35,410 times. Granted, a lot of these hardly count as “photographs” – test shots, useless shots, and just plain bad shots. But even bad photos take up space on my hard drives—and I never delete anything until the shoot is over a year old, and even then I only weed out the ones that are hopelessly useless to me or my clients.

So how much space do 35,410 files need? About 523 gigabytes, it turns out. And people wonder why I’m not eager to look through my archives. A RAW file is much larger than even a high-quality JPEG: the 16 megapixel D7000′s RAW files average around 18 megabytes. They add up fast.

523 gigabytes doesn’t seem like very much to us these days, when multi-terabyte hard drives are affordable and ubiquitous. But ten years ago, the “terabyte” seemed like something only necessary for industrial data-pushing. Numbers are weird, you see. They just keep getting bigger. They have no horizon, no boundaries—unlike our minds. So we add bigger and more impressive prefixes to our bytes. Mega. Giga. Tera. PETABYTES. It’s easy for us to comprehend a thousand of something. But millions and millions of somethings later and we start to get confused.

After a billion or so we just give up. Our brains interpret any big number as “A lot”.

So let’s scale my 35,410 pictures back a bit. At an average of about 15 megabytes each, they total (and I checked) 562,697,784,228 bytes. A byte is a little packet of data that tells your computer what it’s looking at. Each byte is made up of 8 bits – the 1s and 0s of the computer’s binary universe. There are 4.5 trillion ones and zeros scattered among my 2011 archive. That’s an almost impossible number to understand. But if instead of printing my photos and admiring them in the usual manner you took it upon yourself to reduce them to their binary skeletons and print that, you would fill an 800 million page book.

It’s fortunate for you that you can’t afford to get it printed. If the boredom of reading 800 million pages of ones and zeros didn’t kill you, its sheer weight would. Such a volume would be 30 miles tall. Plus a few millimeters if you’d like a hardcover copy. It wouldn’t do you much good, though, because if you somehow found yourself at the top of this 30-mile behemoth you’d be enjoying your last gasps of the stratosphere before you died instantaneously. 99% of the air on our planet would be beneath your feet, leaving you with a pitiable few molecules to cling to. At the top of Mount Everest, six miles up, atmospheric pressure is about 1/3 that of sea level, and humans cannot survive under these conditions for more than a few hours unaided. The atmospheric pressure at the stratopause (top of Mount Book grazes the stratopause, the boundary between the stratosphere and the mesosphere) would be about 1/1000th that of sea level. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the havoc that would wreak on your body. 

You’d be better off saving it to floppy discs; it’s a bit tedious, but you’d end up with a convenient half-mile-tall stack.

But enough of this depressing Matrix-like concern with strings of 1s and 0s. Photos – and all digital data – are only really useful to us when they can be appreciated without peeking into the arcane underbelly of the computer’s processors. So let’s take an average photo as an example.

Gazing at the stratosphere.

This portrait was a test shot I took before a party. It was taken with my D7000, whose 16.2-megapixel sensor is something of a marvel. Less than an inch wide, it comfortably houses 16 million single-color photodetectors. You could line up 20 of these detectors before you matched the thickness of an average human hair. Which, by the way, is a pretty arbitrary way to measure things, given the tremendous variation in hair thicknesses – even on an individual! No matter how you measure them, though, these pixels are tiny.

The above image at full resolution.

But, tiny though they may be, they add up to something much greater than any individual pixel can claim responsibility for. And boy, do they add up! Assuming that every one of my 35,410 pictures were shot at the same resolution (which in reality they were not, but to simplify things we’ll just pretend that they were), we’d be looking at a stack of some 570 billion pixels. If we printed them in a row, each as large as a photodetector – 4.78 microns – that row would stretch for 1692 miles. That’s roughly the distance you’d drive between Camden, Maine and Miami, Florida. Microns – those vanishingly tiny spans, so small you could lose one on a speck of dust – add up.

Bonus points if you noticed that the pixel count for all those pictures (570 billion, slightly inflated due to the differences in resolutions) is remarkably similar to the total number of bytes for all of the RAW files (563 billion). It is not a coincidence.

An eye for an eye

A magnified view of the above image.

It’s amazing to look at the clarity that new imaging devices are capable of achieving. But before we pat ourselves on the backs, remember that we have nothing on evolution, which has had several billions of years to perfect light-capturing technology. Even high-end digital cameras peak at around 60 megapixels, or 60 million pixels. Each human retina, by comparison, has about 120 million photoreceptor cells. That’s a retinal density of about 200,000 in every square millimeter.

Birds of prey, on the other hand, have five times the retinal density of humans. If somebody ever tells you you have eyes like a hawk, you’d better appreciate the compliment. Hawks can spot prey scuttling across a field from a mile away; not only do they have vastly more photoreceptive retinas, their eyes are also finely-tuned to behave like telescopes.

Eyes in general, regardless of their owners, are a wonder of evolutionary mechanics that should make our finest optical engineers blush. In higher organisms, every set of eyes is perfectly tuned to a very particular set of activities essential to the organism’s survival. Birds have an unbelievable level of visual acuity because they need to spot – sometimes from tens of yards away – everything from seeds and bugs to flowers to edible critters. And all the while they need to be aware of things that are spotting them. The same is true of all sighted creatures.

The first eyes are thought to have been developed about half a billion years ago, during the so-called Cambrian Explosion; in fact, they may be directly or indirectly responsible for the explosive rates of change during the Cambrian. Actually, the Cambrian era is a topic for another discussion entirely. Remind me later and I’ll tell you all about it. No matter how you look at it (and 540 million years ago, somebody definitely started looking at something), the first eyes were undoubtedly little more than radiation-sensing devices unable to discern very much at all. In fact, the very earliest powers of vision would have been totally unfamiliar to us; they would likely have felt more like standing next to a light bulb; you can sense the heat radiating from it and tell basically the direction from which it’s coming.

Think back to high school biology. Remember playing with scientifically studying planarians, the little arrow-shaped flatworms? Those dots on the sides of its head that looked like eyes really were eyes—though of the type we described above. They could tell you where light was coming from, but they’d be incapable of admiring photographs. Evolution of the eyes, once photosensitivity was developed, is thought to have happened quickly. It may have taken less than half a million years to go from the most basic visual perception to fully-developed, if very basic, eyes.

But photoreceptors are only a part of the story. In fact, they aren’t even a particularly impressive part, compared to the rest. Ask any photographer and they’ll tell you that the lens is the really crucial part of a camera. The same is true of eyes, and I am in awe of the fact that eyes have managed to evolve in the way that they have. Cells sensitive to certain stimuli are pretty badass, sure, but organs that evolved to focus those stimuli onto the cells in ever more efficient streams? That’s awesome.

The first cameras were pinhole cameras. They allowed just a single ray of light into the, well, pinhole, which was then projected onto a surface for an artist to trace manually. The earliest “lenses” in an organism functioned in exactly the same way. The nautilus, in fact, still uses that structure. Instead of a lens, it has an open “pinhole” that funnels light to its photoreceptors. To use a lens has the double advantage of providing an additional degree of protection as well as allowing more precise focus.

The miracle of everything

I feel like I’m getting distracted, here, but vision is truly remarkable. If you are reading this, then you ought to just close your eyes for a minute and think about the last things that you looked at. It doesn’t matter what they are—a book, your mail, the TV, a loved one, a cherished photo. Take a moment to feel the overwhelming gratitude you should be feeling that you have the power of vision. It is miraculous.

It is seriously mind-boggling to think that our vision has evolved in the way that it has. We tend to think of what we see as “the way the world looks,” but in fact we wouldn’t even recognize the world if we were to really see it. Because our eyes are sensitive to a very narrow range of electromagnetic radiation, we can only see a narrow slice of the Universe with our unaided eyes.

Any time you see infrared or ultraviolet photographs – some of which are quite stunning – you are still only seeing light in the visible range. Technology allows us to capture light beyond the visible spectrum, but it then needs to be converted to something our eyes can understand. Often, when you read about the enormous telescopes used by astronomers to measure the minutiae of the universe, you aren’t reading about telescopes like we’re used to using. Most, like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, rely on data from far without our visible or audible range. The images you see are rendered to be comprehensible to us. By the way, when you hear about a radio telescope, astronomers aren’t sitting there with headphones tuning in to Ryan Seacrest. Listening to the radio waves from the VLA would be hopelessly dull.

Of course, our human vision evolved from that of ancestors who spent their time underwater; we see blue and green most intensely because those are the wavelengths that happen to pass through water easiest. It’s the same reason the pictures you took while you were snorkeling last summer all turned out blue; water filters out huge parts of the visual spectrum, leaving all the vibrant reds and oranges floating near the surface. The sky above us, too, scatters blue light preferentially. Instead of seeing pure white, as you would if the sun’s light shone through directly (or you would if your corneas weren’t busy melting) you see a brilliant blue.

Speaking of the sun, it’s no coincidence that our cameras have twice as many green pixels as blue or red. The sun emits light that peaks in the green range.

The common Bayer array used in most DSLR sensors uses a pattern of one row of alternating blue and green pixels, and one row red and green pixels. The reason for this commonly cited is that human vision is most sensitive to green light; however this isn’t strictly the reason. Human vision is highly sensitive to green light, perhaps more than other wavelengths, but there’s actually no such thing as “green” light – or blue, red, or any other color. Green is comprised of dozens of individual wavelengths, so what we perceive as green tends to be a combination of wavelengths.

However, the way our brain interprets the data coming from the cones of the eye – the cells responsible for distinguishing color – gives green a greater role in providing contrast between colors and shades. If a camera sensor gave red, green, and blue pixels equal weight, the image would appear distorted to us. Green cones cannot be triggered without also triggering blue or red cones, which helps us to calibrate what we perceive as the visible colors.

Shut up already!

Okay, okay, I’ve gone on enough about these things. I just get overwhelmed at the incredible beauty of the universe. Vision is a fantastic thing, and I think it’s easy to forget how amazing it is that we can harness even a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. And look what we’ve done with just that fraction of light!

Photography is an incredible tool. From the infinitely tiny to the immeasurably vast, it helps us see further and more deeply than we have ever been able to before. When I wield my camera, it is with a sense of awe—not just at the world around us, but at the fact that I can record it. I feel a responsibility to record it. There are as many ways of seeing the world as there are people to see it.

As a parting thought, I want to remind my readers that we live in a time of unparalleled technology. It’s easy to scoff at those of us who flip through Twitter on our iPhones, but don’t forget that we have an unbelievable amount of technology at our disposal. My photos from 2011, as I mentioned, came to a total of 4.5 trillion bits. The Voyager probes, by comparison, took their entire twelve-year voyage to Neptune to return 5 trillion bits of data. Some of my photographs are awesome, but the data from the Voyager mission will be cherished forever, and have helped change the way we view ourselves.

How many ways can you  count to 35,410?