On August 21st, 2017 we in the USA experience a natural wonder. A total Solar eclipse. The shadow of the eclipse narrow band spanned across the whole northern USA from Oregon in the west to South Carolina on the east coast. This event was special for many reasons and gave us the opportunity to think about the wonders of the natural world.
As I prepared for my presentation at Warner Pacific University where I guided people through the phenomenon as it was occurring, I started thinking about how humanity has experienced solar (and lunar) eclipses and how metaphorical they have become. The first experience of course was un-expected and the explanation for the event was metaphysical, attributed to supernatural forces, and some eclipses became the signal for some ominous event. But then science happened.
With scientific knowledge a sense of predictability came, if one knows how something works, say the solar system, then future events (like eclipses) can be unmasked and previous events can be explained.
As I prepared for my presentation at Warner Pacific University where I guided people through the phenomenon as it was occurring, I started thinking about how humanity has experienced solar (and lunar) eclipses and how metaphorical they have become. The first experience of course was un-expected and the explanation for the event was metaphysical, attributed to supernatural forces, and some eclipses became the signal for some ominous event. But then science happened.
With scientific knowledge a sense of predictability came, if one knows how something works, say the solar system, then future events (like eclipses) can be unmasked and previous events can be explained.
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| "Total Solar Eclipse 2017 Path USA Map" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0 |
This for me is the power and importance that science has. Being able to predict.
Predictions even though may appear simple they can be misrepresented or they can become the force to cause the prediction (a self-fulfilling prophecy) or they might be the cause that what is being predicted doesn't occur. For the first case, I can mention how as I was explaining the eclipse with a map of the USA with a shadow of where the eclipse would be seen some people misinterpreted the map thinking that the eclipse would be occurring at different times in the US as in the map the shadow was marked with the time. So if it was 9:00 AM in PDX it would have 12:00 PM at NY. People would interpret that as if the shadow of the eclipse was moving from PDX to NY taking three hours to get there not realizing that, in fact, 9 am in PDX is the same time as 12 noon in NY; even the caption in the picture talks about a path!
The second kind of prediction where we have a self-fulfilling prophecy is when an economic model predicts that there will be a scarcity of some product, as we saw in recent times with the COVID-19 pandemic and toilet paper, causing citizens to hoard toilet paper and thus scarcity.
The third kind of prediction is when people react to the prediction thus making the prediction fail. That is the case of the movie Soylent Green that predicted in 1973 that NY city would have 40 million people by the year 2022. This prediction was on a film that represented the feeling of society at the time and was based on statistical projections based on good data at the time. What did happen then was that people realize that the future exposed on the film was not what they desired for their lives and therefore stop moving to NY creating a new trend that made the initial prophecy fail.
Today, in the midst of a pandemic, we are wondering about the immediate future and the long term. How can we know what kind of future are we creating with the actions we are taking now? Are we going back to normal? Are we going to create a new normal?
The answers to these questions will take a lot of discernment. But one thing I am sure of is that science should have a central role in decision making. We need to learn how to interpret data obtained by different means. We need to view the environment as integral to our own human existence. We can't forget how everything is connected and how wrong and stubborn ideologies will backfire.
As a teaching professor in STEM, I feel especially obligated to ask these questions and to help my students develop critical thinking so they will not fall prey to conspiracy theories abundant today in our cyberspace.
