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We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true, or what we want to be true, without regard to what is true. Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations. We’ve lost all sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions. We’re quick with acts of aggression and slow with acts of kindness.
Sidereus Nuncius translates from the Latin to Starry Messenger.
war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, race, each an artificial battlefield on the landscape of life—and
When people disagree in our complex world of politics, religion, and culture, the causes are simple, even if the resolutions are not. We all wield different portfolios of knowledge. We possess different values, different priorities, and different understandings of all that unfolds around us. We see the world differently from one another, and by doing so, we construct tribes based on who looks like us, who prays to the same gods as we do, and who shares our moral code.
Groupthink, even when it defies rational analysis, may have conferred survival advantages to our ancestors.
When illuminated by it, you fast discover that Earth supports not many tribes, but only one—the human tribe.
Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into believing that something is true when it is false, or that something is false when it is true.
Leonardo da Vinci would be in full agreement: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinion.”
conduct experiments to test your hypothesis and allocate your confidence in proportion to the strength of your evidence.
In 1660, a mere eighteen years after Galileo’s death, the Royal Society of London was founded, and is still going strong as the world’s oldest independent scientific academy. Newly advanced scientific ideas have been contested there ever since, inspired by its marvelously blunt motto, “Take nobody’s word for it.”
Objective truths apply to all people, places, and things, as well as all animals, vegetables, and minerals. Some of these truths apply across all of space and time. They are true even when you don’t believe in them.
Like a matryoshka nesting doll, modern physics enclosed classical physics within these larger truths.
Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.
Personal truths have the power to command your mind, body, and soul, but are not evidence-based. Personal truths are what you’re sure is true, even if you can’t—especially if you can’t—prove it.
It’s no secret that people will give their lives, or take the lives of others, in support of what they believe.
That which is objectively true or honestly authentic—especially on Earth or in the heavens—tends to possess a beauty of its own that transcends time, place, and culture. Sunsets remain mesmerizing, even though you get one every day.
That juxtaposition of a “star” with the crescent Moon remains a sacred symbol of the faith. Vincent van Gogh couldn’t turn away either. On June 21, 1889,3 he captured it from the pre-dawn skies in Saint-Rémy, France, creating what is perhaps his best-known painting, The Starry Night.
The truths of nature are rampant with beauty and wonder, out to the largest of measures of space and time.
Cloud taxonomy fascinated the Scottish meteorologist Ralph Abercromby, and in 1896 he documented as many as he could around the world, creating a numerical sequence for them. You guessed it. Cumulonimbus clouds landed at number 9, unwittingly seeding the everlasting concept of being on “cloud nine” when in a blissful state.
In the White House of the 1990s, Bill Clinton kept on his Oval Office coffee table, between the two facing couches, a sample Moon rock brought back to Earth from a quarter-million miles away by Apollo astronauts. He told me that any time an argument was about to break out between geopolitical adversaries or recalcitrant members of Congress, he would point to the rock and remind people it came from the Moon.8 This gesture often recalibrated the conversation, serving as a reminder that cosmic perspectives can force you to take pause and reflect on the meaning of life, and on the value of peace
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Smallpox, malaria, and the bubonic plague together have killed upwards of 1.5 billion people throughout time, worldwide. That toll far exceeds all deaths from all armed conflicts in the history of our species. Nature has killed more of us than we have of ourselves. These thoughts hardly ever (likely never) arise whenever we declare nature’s beauty.
One final note on our troglodytes: They breathed fresh air. They drank clean water. They ate organic plants and free-range animals—yet their staggeringly high infant mortality left them with an average life expectancy of barely thirty years. Modern science matters.
It also leaves you thinking that all the amazing discoveries and inventions—the ones in your lifetime—mean you live in special times.
humans are linear thinkers, so you can’t blame any of them for these quaint imaginings of their future.
And this sentence, with clear and present meaning in 2020: Google it to see if there’s a smartphone selfie video posted to YouTube in 4K that went viral. … is laden with mysterious nouns and verbs with no meaning to anyone in 1990.
your elders may carry more wisdom than you for navigating human sentiments such as love, kindness, integrity, and honor, which remain among the few constants of the world.
With only one or two human-made structures visible from Earth orbit, everything else that divides us—national borders, politics, languages, skin color, who you worship—is invisible to you.
The irrigated/desert borders are in the Middle East, between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and between Israel and large swaths of the West Bank—regions of ceaseless political tension. The GDP per capita of Israel is twelve times larger than that of Palestine.
I’m instead plagued by a simpler thought that, as a species, we might not possess the maturity or wisdom the future requires to assure the survival of civilization.
the strength of the Moon’s tides has nothing to do with the Moon’s phase.
The Sun’s tides on Earth are about one-third the strength of the Moon’s tides, yet hardly anybody talks about them.
During full Moon, high Sun tides add directly to high Moon tides, giving the false impression that the full Moon impa...
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One of the rewards for doing well in the moon lottery is that the Sun is four hundred times wider than the Moon, and it happens to be four hundred times farther away. This pure coincidence renders the Sun and Moon about the same size in the sky, allowing for spectacular solar eclipses.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves.
Including all casualties among all warring nations across the six-year span of World War II (1939 through 1945), more than one thousand people were killed—per hour.
A scientist’s entire mission in life is to discover features of nature that are true, even if they conflict with your philosophies.
Even Wernher von Braun, the architect of Apollo’s rockets to the Moon, famously commented on the success of the V2 ballistic missile,3 which he pioneered for Nazi Germany and launched primarily against London and Antwerp,4 The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.
Arguing more loudly or strenuously or more articulately than your opponent simply reveals how annoying and obstinate you are.
In rare cases, both sides of an argument can be right, but only when they unknowingly describe disparate features of the same object or phenomenon—like the proverbial blind men who each describe their encounter with an elephant—the tusk, the tail, the ears, the legs, the trunk. They could argue all day about who is right and who is wrong. Or they could keep exploring, and eventually figure out that these are distinct parts of a single animal. That too requires more experiments and observations—more data—to determine what is objectively true.
Access to space may be more than just the next frontier to explore; it could be civilization’s best hope for survival.
Of all professions, scientists may be uniquely capable of generating and sustaining peace among nations.
The United States and Russia (USSR) were the only countries with the capacity to put a human into orbit for forty-two years, until China joined the club and launched their first taikonaut in 2003. Between and among us, the emotional connections were deep, and the friendships rose far above earthly politics. We shared a bond forged in space.
The top two most costly displays of international cooperation, in order, are the waging of war and the construction and operation of the International Space Station. Others include the Olympics and the World Cup. Three of those four engage in competition, one of which causes the loss of human life.
in July 1975, astronauts and cosmonauts executed a first-ever space rendezvous in a docking maneuver between our Apollo command module and their Soyuz capsule. The only rule when they popped the hatch? Americans would speak only Russian, and the Russians would speak only English.
the only two sitting US presidents with a previous divorce on their record were Republicans Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. President Trump has divorced twice.
Melania is his third wife. His second wife was who he cheated with on his first wife. And he has children with all three women.
the anti-vaccine movement (another science-rejecting platform), was led primarily by liberal-leaning communities.
Hidden bias can cause a persistent urge to see all that agrees with you and ignore all that does not, even when countervailing examples abound.
Even though no lions lurk behind parked cars and no poisonous berries await us at the corner grocer, these prehistoric behaviors, when ported to modern civilization, remain with us and manifest across a broad spectrum of irrational behavior.
You would need to consume four hundred million pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for its trace amounts of glyphosate to kill you. But after only 20 pints you will die from its sugar content.
