Wombat Diet

A TV channel that was unknown to me last year is proving to be very worthwhile. It’s called UK TV History. Between tiresome ads for car insurance and debt refinancing schemes it puts out some terrific programs. I wouldn’t have thought it was history, at first, but one of the best lately has been a series on the story of the earth: geological history. Earth Story, presented by Aubrey Manning, is a TV series repeat, but what a story it is.

The geological highlights of my undergraduate education were these:

1. The principle of uniformitarianism
2. Learning to read rocks

Unformitarianism is simply the idea that the laws of physics haven’t changed and that natural processes observable today occurred in the same way in the past. If this innocuous and reasonable idea is accepted then, all of a sudden, it turns out that the earth must be a lot older than some would have you believe.

The second powerful idea was also very reasonable and, in a way, similar. “Here” said our lecturer, pointing to a rock,

…you can see a crystal of kyanite.

It was a fresh Saturday morning when I might have preferred to stay in bed instead of traipse up a mountain.

He went on to explain that this mineral forms from its constituent ingredients at a known temperature — from lab experiments — and that it therefore tells you how hot the rock was when it was formed. One minute it was just a crystal, then it was a temperature gauge and recorder. Then you could join them up and plot them on a map and do similar things for other kinds of minerals. The context was the intrusion of a molten granite magma into surrounding country rock which was then metamorphosed, royally. It allowed one to join up the dots with only one simple and reasonable hypothesis, that all crystals of the same mineral form at the same temperature, and have always done so. You find this crystal, you know the temperature. Lo and behold, the high temperature crystals are at the centre and those that form at lower temperatures are in concentric rings, never the other way around.

And on it goes, fitting together perfectly consistently. This rock here containing these fossils is the same age as that rock there containing the same fossils. It’s not an opinion. It’s an interpretation supported by evidence.

The grandest and most convincing story of all was plate tectonics. It was compelling.

However, not until today did I see interviews with some of the people who had joined up the dots to make the hypothesis — one that every child who has ever played with wooden continents has surely articulated at some time — that the continents move and that some of them used to fit together.

Today I watched George Plafker show how he found barnacles 12 ft above sea level after an earthquake in Alaska, and how he followed the barnacles 500 miles up and down the coastline. By the time he had finished measuring where land had risen and fallen after the earthquake, and understood the effects of past earthquakes, the fit with the idea of continental plates meeting, and a subduction zone where one was convected, was irresistable. I think the patron saint of barnacles, Mr.Darwin, would have enjoyed it immensely.

It occured to me, as I marveled at the way in which evidence was marshaled from all over the world and beatifully assembled, that it’s really a CRIME of some sort that most people, apparently, have no idea, not just of the history of the earth, but of the way that science works. One hears that evolution is “only a theory” but never that gravitation or plate tectonics are only theories.

All school children should see something like this series and, as an excercise in critical thinking, get to examine the case in favour of the earth being created in 4,004BC.

It seems that non-scientific explanations of earth history, all too often, get equal air time. The recent opening of a creation museum in the US was reported here as if it was merely a theme park not an assault on science and reason. Perhaps the media situation looks even worse to the biblical literalists.

Does it matter? Cosmically? Perhaps not. Seeing the fruits of science and technology misused is to be reminded, nevertheless, of Mark Twain’s line that a lie can travel half-way round the world before the truth can get it’s shoes on.

I am optimistic however. First, I am convinced that the truth can be hit with a hammer and give the same answer each time. Second, I believe that given hammers and open minds and an opportunity to do so, most people will make reasonable inferences about what’s true.

Lastly, I record my envy of future students of the past. In a generation or less every schoolchild with an Internet connection will have unimaginable resources at their fingertips. Not just the Earth Story, but incredible simulations that exist as virtual worlds.

Having recently anticpated a virtual ancient Rome in which I could spend some time in future I found in the mail the very next day an announcement of such a thing, available now. It was featured in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery:

An international team of researchers has created a 3D digital reproduction of ancient Rome as it appeared at the peak of its power in AD 320. … the project took 10 years and a global team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists.. The simulation will be used by scientists to run experiments and as a scholarly journal that will be updated with each new discovery.

It sounds like the future to me! However, I was disappointed at the lack of people. It’s Rome after the neutron bomb, for now. But still it’s a glimpse through the keyhole at the pedagogy of the future.

Not long ago the kind of computer power needed for virtual worlds was only for the likes of NASA, but thanks to the rate of change in the IT industry yesterday’s multi-million dollar supercomputer is today’s hobby machine (see: e.g.). Which surely means that it will be possible to test new social policies in cyberworlds first, just as the virtual world can shed light on epidemiological problems now.

Tags: Education, Evolution, History, Internet, Misc, Technology, Time