Religion v. Science

The Catholic Lab podcase is an excellent resource on the Catholic involvement with science.

It might just dispel some myths.

Medieval Science...

...not as dark as you were taught:

Galen's texts wouldn't be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections often in public surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.

The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red "metal wax" compound that helped preserve the body. [Gallery: Historic Images of Human Anatomy]

The preparation of the specimen was surprisingly advanced. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe's anti-scientific "Dark Ages." In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.

"It's state-of-the-art," Charlier told LiveScience. "I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this."

Myths of the middle ages

Historians in the 1800s referred to the Dark Ages as a time of illiteracy and barbarianism, generally pinpointing the time period as between the fall of the Roman Empire and somewhere in the Middle Ages. To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance.

But modern historians see the Middle Ages quite differently. That's because continued scholarship has found that the medieval period wasn't so ignorant after all. [Busted! 10 Medieval Myths]

"There was considerable scientific progress in the later Middle Ages, in particular from the 13th century onward," said James Hannam, an historian and author of "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution" (Regnery Publishing, 2011).

For centuries, the advancements of the Middle Ages were forgotten, Hannam told LiveScience. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became an "intellectual fad," he said, for thinkers to cite ancient Greek and Roman sources rather than scientists of the Middle Ages. In some cases, this involved straight-up fudging. Renaissance mathematician Copernicus, for example, took some of his thinking on the motion of the Earth from Jean Buridan, a French priest who lived between about 1300 and 1358, Hannam said. But Copernicus credited the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his inspiration.

Much of this selective memory stemmed from anti-Catholic feelings by Protestants, who split from the church in the 1500s.

As a result, "there was lots of propaganda about how the Catholic Church had been holding back human progress, and it was great that we were all Protestants now," Hannam said.

Anatomical dark ages?

From this anti-Catholic sentiment arose a great many myths, such as the idea that everyone believed the world to be flat until Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. ("They thought nothing of the sort," Hannam said.)

Similarly, Renaissance propagandists spread the rumor that the Medieval Christian church banned autopsy and human dissection, holding back medical progress.

In fact, Hannam said, many societies have banned or limited the carving up of human corpses, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to early Europeans (that's why Galen was stuck dissecting animals and peering into gladiator wounds). But autopsies and dissection were not under a blanket church ban in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church sometimes ordered autopsies, often for the purpose of looking for signs of holiness in the body of a supposedly saintly person.

The first example of one of these "holy autopsies" came in 1308, when nuns conducted a dissection of the body of Chiara of Montefalco, an abbess who would be canonized as a saint in 1881. The nuns reported finding a tiny crucifix in the abbess heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder, which they saw as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.

Science describes nature, but that doesn't mean it understands nature.

Tony Rothman points out some conundrums of science:

Each February, I begin the introductory electricity and magnetism course at Princeton University by telling my students that the material we will cover during the semester provides the basis for modern civilization.


Who could quibble with such an innocent statement? Without the discoveries of nineteenth-century physicists and their successors, we could hardly imagine today’s world: no electrical power grid, no televisions, no satellites, no iPads.

Physicists are justly proud of the many ways that their achievements have benefited humankind. But building a light bulb or a telephone doesn’t mean that you understand its basic principles (Thomas Edison and Alexander Bell certainly didn’t). Unfortunately, many of my colleagues – particularly those who write textbooks – present physics as a towering, seamless basilica, ignoring the gaps in our hodge-podge of skewed models. In fact, what is presented as a shimmering cathedral often more closely resembles a hastily erected shantytown.

For example, one needs only first-semester equations to describe reasonably well the behavior of a gyroscope; engineers can then go off and build gyrocompasses that guide aircraft or missiles to their destinations. But if you merely ask, “At what, exactly, is the gyroscope pointed?” you are plunged headlong into one of physics’ deepest questions, one that led Einstein to develop his general theory of relativity – and that, even today, has no definitive answer. I know of no undergraduate textbook that acknowledges the question.

On a more blatant, if less exalted, level, the force of friction makes its appearance in the first days of any first-year course. We declare, as if there can be no doubt, that friction impedes the motion between two bodies, and we invoke sophisticated microscopic models that show how the soles of running shoes bind to a track.

Yet friction produces heat and thus an increase in entropy – which measures the amount of energy that cannot be used to perform work – and it therefore distinguishes past from future. The increase in entropy – the second law of thermodynamics – is the only law of nature that makes this fundamental distinction.

If Newtonian mechanics is at the bottom of everything, then one should be able to derive the second law of thermodynamics from Newtonian physics. But this has never been accomplished satisfactorily: the incompatibility of the second law with the other fundamental laws is perhaps the greatest paradox in all of physics.

Still, we brazenly drop this enigma into the first days of a first-year course without batting an eye. We write down equations that show how friction slows the motion of sliding objects or dampens the vibrations in springs, but, ultimately, the math merely reproduces our observations while disguising our ignorance of what underlies them.

After decades – indeed, centuries – of employing such tricks, physicists have forgotten that they are modeling phenomena, not necessarily uncovering Divine Truth. For instance, we can easily write down the equations for a ball on a swinging spring, but if we stretch the spring enough and swing the ball hard enough, we can’t solve those equations. The motion becomes chaotic, making an exact mathematical solution impossible.

Nowadays, with computers, we can approximate the trajectory as closely as we want. But that is the point: most physicists and students have lost sight of the distinction between the approximate and the exact. We can certainly learn something about chaotic systems without actually solving the equations, but if an old-fashioned mathematician demanded that a student predict where that ball was heading, the student would inevitably fail.

Even something as fundamental as Newton’s law of gravity is ultimately an approximation. Textbook authors dutifully write down the famous law without remarking that it results in infinite forces when the two attracting objects get infinitely close together. Never mind that infinite forces are a sure sign that your theory has gone up in smoke: in the current crop of textbooks sitting on my desk, not one mentions the obvious pathology.

Our Princeton text compounds the oversight by declaring that, “strictly speaking” Newton’s law of gravity is valid only for particles. Well, particles are exactly where Newton goes awry – and not just in first-semester physics. The basic equation of electricity is “Coulomb’s law,” which governs the electrical attraction or repulsion between charged particles and looks exactly like Newton’s law of gravity. Now, we always tell students to imagine electrons as point particles, in which case they really do need to worry about those infinite forces.

The problems that arise from modeling particles as vanishingly small points infect all advanced areas of physics. Central to any quantum mechanics course is the concept of electron “spin,” but what, exactly, is spinning is never made clear. Wolfgang Pauli, one of the concept’s originators, at first rejected the idea, because if the electron has a finite radius, then the surface would be spinning faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, if you view the electron as a point particle, how are you to imagine something without a radius spinning?

To cure the point-particle pathologies, physicists invented modern field theories, with impressive names such as quantum electrodynamics. But these theories turned out to be as riddled with infinities as their grandparents, and elaborate ad hoc schemes were invented to deal with the new problems encountered.

And so, despite headline-grabbing advances such as string theory, it goes to this very day. One can hardly challenge the predictive success of modern physics, but one should remember that one is describing nature, and not always understanding it.

Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science...

...explained by Hillel Orfek at The New Atlantis.