I was in the mood for some scientific thought today, so I perused the Scientific American web site. I came across two articles of note.

First, this one about “Folk Science”. What is folk science? Is it anything like “polk salad”? (Remember that old song “Polk Salad Annie” by Tony Joe White? Well, never mind.) No, folk science is what the average person thinks about things. Frequently, the way that the average person thinks about things is scientifically correct. The process of evolution gave human beings proper senses for perceiving things of certain sizes; basically from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a mountain. These are things that we can see, things we can smell, things that we can get our hands on (or walk over, in the case of a mountain). We also have a pretty good notion of the kinds of energy reactions that affect these things, e.g. fire, freezing cold, sunlight, lightening, hand power and horse power.

But our senses weren’t designed to get a handle on the biggest and smallest things of the universe. Therefore, in the days before science, it seemed logical that the earth was flat, that lightening was caused by a god or gods, that disease was triggered by some kind of an “evil spirit”, that the sun popped up out of the flat earth in the morning and settled back down into it in the evening. That was and is what folk science is all about.

The point of the article is that even today, even with all of the progress that science has made and all it has done for humankind, there is still a deeply inbreed tendency within many people toward folk science. For example, some of us think that we can cure ourselves when we get sick based on a story of what worked for someone else (the scientific method says that you have to test something on a whole lot more than one person to conclude that it is an effective cure; and you have to ask if there is something different between you and the other person). Hey, admittedly, I’ve done this too.

But generally I believe in science and the scientific method. Most people who read Scientific American (or have at least heard of it) probably do so themselves. And yet, a writer in Scientific American sees fit to give us a lecture about the evils of folk science. What are we, the SciAm faithful, doing wrong? Well, a lot of reasonably intelligent people still believe in God, and still think that our consciousness and self-awareness is something more than a set of neurons in the brain responding to stimuli in a programmed fashion, much like a computer. That’s getting the Scientific American editorial board a bit miffed, I think (although the article doesn’t directly mention God). And on this frontier, I would have to warn Scientific American and the science establishment to “back off”.

Science knows a whole lot; it’s amazing what science understands or at least knows something about. But it seems to me that scientists do not fully appreciate the fact that they do NOT know everything. In fact, they don’t know all that much about the simplest and most basic questions that philosophers have pondered for centuries (e.g., why was the world divided into solids, liquids and gasses? Why not four or five kinds of stuff, or why not only two?). It seems to be more and more fashionable these days amidst scientists to herald themselves as atheists. To be taken seriously as a neuro-consciousness researcher, you pretty much have to profess your disbelief in any and every notion of a higher power. To me, that starts to sound like bias. I.e., answering the question before all of the empirical evidence is in.

Generally, “folk science” leads common folk to believe in God. But today’s scientists seem to be developing their own folk science, based on atheism. To me, that’s just as intellectually disingenuous as “the leap of faith”. No, actually more so. The leapers at least admit that they’re leaping. The scientists seem to be above that. I’d have a whole lot more respect for the SciAm crowd if they ‘fessed up to their similarly irrational “leap of disbelief”.

For those of you (those few of you) who have regularly read my ruminations, you know that I generally err on the side of faith, although not without some wavering. But I still have much regard for science. To me, science is still a vision of the good, an instance of humankind responding to something bigger than itself. Each of us has maybe four or five things that really “move us”. Scientific and mathematical thought is certainly on my list.

So, I was taken by another article about a scientist named Alain Conne who is using complex mathematical theories regarding geometry to come up with a potential “theory of everything”, one that rivals the elegance and power of string theory. Yea, geometry and topology — the theory of shapes and surfaces — is a very understated area of math and science. I’m looking for a good popular-level book on it.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I remember reading how useful the study of shapes and surfaces is for science. But I didn’t take it seriously. Now, 35 years later, I’ve lost track of the times that I’ve read about how science is using shape analogies to gain an understanding of some really important theoretical stuff. Einstein’s relativity theories about gravity are now taught in terms of “the heavy ball on the rubber surface”. This ain’t merely to show what gravity does to time-space; it’s meant to show what gravity and time-space ARE, or at least are like. Non-Euclidian geometry (where you get beyond the basic geometry of straight lines and right angles that we are used to, i.e. the geometry of “folk science”) allows inquiries to be made about worlds with 7 dimensions where time can run backward and forward. And about the quantum world, which is even weirder.

So it’s pretty cool to read about how geometry is being used to help test and answer some of the hairiest problems about the “Standard Model” of sub-atomic particles. But as a “man of possible faith”, I do need to leave you with a bit of Pythagoras and his “music of the spheres”. Pythagoras sought ways to blend the “mystery of the divine” with common-sense rational thought, including much mathematical thought about space and shapes. He was actually pretty nutty, despite the good solid math ideas that he left behind. But I still hold out hope that we will someday hear the “song of God” — yes, the real, industrial-strength God, the God of Christian, Islamic and Jewish folklore — in the midst of our non-Euclidian geometric equations. As Pythagoras would have liked.