The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

I listened to the Forrest Gump soundtrack the other day and I've had the Age of Aquarius song stuck in my head. While I was trying to find a place to listen to the song today, I read a little bit about it. Apparently it's from some hippie musical called Hair, and then was later released as a pop song by the 5th Dimension. And, contrary to popular references (including my own three sentences ago) the song is just called "Aquarius", not "Age of Aquarius". Whatever, right?

Here's the interesting thing: Apparently there is some discord among astrologers about when the age of Aquarius really begins, but the first lines of the song lyrics give their own measurement for when it begins: "When the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars". According to Wikipedia this alignment will really happen on Feb. 14, 2009.

So, whatever the heck the age of Aquarius is, it starts on this week on Valentine's day. Weird, huh?

A Bad Week for Poetry

I'm not an expert on poetry or anything, but I do like poetry. I even took a poetry class in high school (that I've mostly forgotten). I just want it understood that I'm not a poetry-hater before I say what needs to be said.

About that poetry after Obama's speech on Tuesday: it sucked.

Ok, I don't really know if the poem itself sucked, because it was so boring that I have no idea what the heck the poem was even about. It might be a perfectly good and thought-provoking poem when read on paper. I don't really know. Either the poem sucked, or the delivery sucked, but something definitely sucked.

Wouldn't you be trying to get some kind of message across in a political poem? Well what good is your message if no one can stand listening to you read it? Did the author really need to give a two-second-long pause between every word of the poem? She should have just had Captain Kirk read it. At least his uncomfortably-long-pauses are spaced out enough to make it seem dramatic. Seriously, I couldn't even pay attention to her long enough to hear a whole sentence, let alone to understand what the poem was about. If they really needed that poem to be read after Obama's speech then they should have just typed it into a Speak & Spell and I think it'd be easier to understand.

Sorry about my last post. I've been informed that it doesn't make any sense. I still like it, though, so I'm not changing it. Instead, I'll just offer my apologies to anyone whose IQ was lowered because of reading it, and I'll try to give you a serious related post to try and make up some of those lost brain cells.

I'm not very far into Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", but I have noticed something about the way he explains some of the more controversial scientific ideas (such as the big bang). He never insults or discredits religious ideas because of scientific discovery. He is especially courteous and careful about it, trying to be clear that science does not discredit religion, but just adds new understanding.

Take the following excerpt for instance. Hawking has just explained that we can observe that the universe is expanding. From that we know that the universe was once closer together than it is now, and from that we can deduce that there was once a time when the universe was "all at exactly the same place". Now the big bang (when the universe started expanding from being all in exactly the same place) is often treated as being at odds with the idea of divine creation, but Hawking doesn't explain it that way at all.

One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!

I'm very impressed that Hawking doesn't try to say that the big bang discredits the creation, and even offers an explanation of how they can both be true.

One of the reasons that this is so thought-provoking to me is because I realize that the scientific community seems to be much more considerate of the religious community than we are of them. Hawking (himself an atheist) is very careful not to discredit the religious views of his readers, but it seems common to me that religious people are eager to discredit science as "just a theory" and to disbelieve the whole of scientific discovery rather than figure out how to reconcile their beliefs with the new knowledge that mankind is developing.

Science is bunk

I've started reading "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. In the first chapter he describes the goals of science and scientific theory. Unfortunately, I think he's wrong about a crucial assumption. Here's (a misrepresentation of) an excerpt from the book:

The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the [construction on I-80]. However, the approach most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that tell us how [the construction on I-80] changes with time. (If we know what [I-80] is like at any one time, these physical laws tell us how it will look at any later time.) Second, there is the question of the initial state of [I-80]. Some people feel that science should be concerned only with the first part; they regard the question of the initial [creation of I-80] as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that [the government], being omnipotent, could have started the [I-80] any way that [they] wanted. That may be so, but in that case [they] also could have made [the construction] develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that [they] chose to make [the construction move along] in a very regular way according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state [of I-80].

See? Sure, he starts off reasonable enough, but did you see how he thinks that the construction moves along in some way that actually makes sense? Sorry, Stephen, but if the construction is really done "in a completely arbitrary way", then science can't hope to discover any laws to understand it nor to predict when (if ever) it will be completed.

Ok, maybe Stephen Hawking wasn't really talking about the construction on I-80, but if science can't even make sense of the construction, there's no way it can describe the whole universe.

Jane Austen's lingo

Kelly and I watched Emma the other day (because we like Clueless and we knew that it was a modern day take on the same Jane Austen book). I don't understand the way these people talk. Several times during the movie I had to pause it so that Kelly could explain to me what a character had just said. Once as she was translating she realized that she didn't understand what they had said, either, so we had to rewind and try again. It was still fun to watch the movie, but mostly because we liked trying to figure out how all of the characters from the two movies matched up. I missed Murray, though.