In about a
month, I’ll be teaching one of my favorite classes: Science, Technology, and
Social Change. As you might guess from the title, the class encompasses the
history and philosophy of science through the ages, as well as the ways new
technology presents new questions and answers.
Topics are
as ancient as the teachings of the pre-Socratics and as modern as the latest in
observations of black holes.
I like to
start by asking my students to place themselves on the technology spectrum between
Luddite and Early Adopter.
It’s
amusing enough to read anti-technology sentiments from students who are earning
their degrees completely online.
But no one
beats a woman I saw at a conference hotel a few years ago, as we both waited in
line for an elevator. This person wore a large, obviously homemade button on
her lapel: LAST LIVING LUDDITE.
I smiled.
“That can’t be you,” I said.
“Yes
it is,” she said, head held high. “I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t
email or text. I’m not on Facebook—”
I had to
interrupt. “So, you’re not in line for the elevator?”
She looked
confused. “Of course I am.”
But this
was a very smart lady. I could tell by her frown that she knew where I was
headed.
The
elevator came. The lady turned and walked away. I wondered if she used the
stairs or simply took the next car.
I wish
she’d stayed. I love hearing about people’s attitudes toward technology, where
their thresholds are.
On July 22, 1933 (before even I was born) Aviator Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world. The flight took 7 days and 19 hours.
In August 1935 Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers were flying together in a hybrid airplane when they crashed 15 miles outside of Point Barrow, Alaska.
With renewed interest in travel to outer space, I’m inclined to revisit para.
Para is all around us these days, especially with the release of the US Navy UFO videos. (Excuse me, UAP, the new name: Unidentified Arial Phenomena.)
We have paramedics, paralegals, paraprofessionals, parapsychology, and, of course, PARANORMAL. I’ve been trying to figure out what paranormal means vis a vis “normal.”
There are many possibilities.
One option is to consider it similar to what para
means in paralegal. I had a brief career as a paralegal at a large law firm in
San Francisco. We thought of ourselves as “almost” legals, just a few
years of study away from being lawyers. Maybe
paranormal is “almost normal.”
But if you know the legal profession, you know para in
this case means “subsidiary role of a lesser status.” With few
exceptions, the lawyers in the firm reminded us of that hour by billable hour.
I didn’t last long as a paralegal. Something about the way the law allows one to
argue from two contradictory premises. That’s not my dog, but if it were my
dog it didn’t bite you. But that’s another blog.
Another meaning of para is “guarding against,”
as in a parasol, which guards against the sun, and a parachute, which
guards against free fall.
Paranormal might mean “guarding
against the normal.”
My most intense brush with paranormal came while I was teaching
a course in the scientific method at a university in the SF Bay Area. The
school was known at the time for its groundbreaking classes in nontraditional
fields. A student could get a degree in Transpersonal Psychology, for example or
Mysticism.
Really.
I taught a class with a full enrollment of mysticism
majors. You have to pity them with me as an instructor.
The dean admitted outright that he’d hired me to be the
Visiting Rationalist. I was to be tough on the students, force them to be
scientific, to present their fields of study as “scientific, with
real hypotheses and experiments.”
I had a tough choice to make: teach them classical physics rife
with deterministic principles that allow no wiggle room, or confess that modern
(i.e., quantum) physics seems every bit as strange as paranormal
phenomena..
Some examples.
Entanglement
is the phenomenon by which two particles are inexorably linked no matter how
much distance separates them. The state of one particle can be teleported to
another particle far away.
String theory proposes that everything in the
universe—matter, space, time—is made up of ten- (or greater) dimensional,
invisible, vibrating strings.
And here’s a winner: the uncertainty principle.
Essential to the foundation of quantum physics, the uncertainty principle tells
us it’s impossible to make a measurement of a physical system without
disturbing that system.
Hold on. Isn’t that one of the things we’ve criticized about
“soft” sciences like psychology (let alone the “para”
version)? That you can’t observe and make “exact” measurements of
behavior because the presence of the measurer affects the result?
There’s more—so many phenomena like time travel and speeds
faster than that of light are possible in the world of the very, very small. As
long as you sneak the behavior in under the radar, which is on the order of 10
to the -27 (pretty small), you can do just about anything you want.
The mysticism majors? They would have preferred that I
congratulate them on having observation, hypothesis, experiment. Just like Newton.
A few weeks ago the Department of Defense formally released three Navy videos that contain “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Don’t get too excited, the Pentagon warned, and astrophysicists seemed to agree. There’s no breakthrough; skeptics can hold on to their arguments that the UAPs can be explained by atmospheric effects, reflections, and even bugs in the imaging code.
I've been a factory worker, a translator, a teacher, an experimental physicist, a nuclear safeguards engineer, a writer, a waitress, a miniaturist, a paralegal, a nun, a minister, a short order cook, a ticket taker, an editor, a crafter, and a cotton candy twirler.
I am still some of these, plus a wife.
No wonder I still have a spectrum of stories to write.