LAPD

This morning I enjoyed the following list of top 10 science based predictions that didn't come true. (Thanks to T.C. for posting a link!) Living in a science community as I do (the national laboratory town of Los Alamos, NM), surrounded by amazing scientists, I am constantly amazed myself at how our culture has imbued prophetic proportions to the predictions of men, even when they are proved wrong over and over again. I am not against scientific discovery and argument, which is often of necessity a trial-and-error method, and but against the presumptuous attitude that all knowledge must be scientific knowledge, or it is no knowledge at all, or it is at the least vastly inferior to scientific knowledge. Our culture has made idols of these things.

I really shouldn't place all the blame on our culture: some of the blame for this rests with the scientists themselves, of course. I am a happy member of a small, conservative church, where all 5 elders are PhD scientists in physics or chemistry or engineering. Hard to get more technically-bound than that! (Even the deacons are all scientists or engineers.) Each of these "doctors" went through a rigorous academic system that taught them to think carefully, analyze thoroughly, make sure conclusions, and defend them. Now, you want these guys on your side when the denomination is studying an issue like nuclear proliferation. But try getting ceiling fans installed by this group of men! Now, don't get me wrong: they are godly and humble fellows, and I love them one and all, but in order to install ceiling fans to move around the warm air in the summer, we had to calculate the max air flow rates in our space, determine the optimal amount of air flow that causes the sensation of cooling on a body, determine the size and noise-tolerance level needed, and then install one to experiment with the actual results. It took years. They have been trained to be skeptics and once they make a decision to stand by it. You can hardly expect them to leave this training aside in their every day lives.

I love this quirky town, and my quirky church. These men, my elders, many of them noted scientists in their fields, have learned to humble themselves before the creator of the universe, but they were built by that same God to be scientific sorts. Where else can you walk into a sanctuary after worship and find groups of men and children dispersed around the sanctuary doing an acoustics experiment, or overhear an actual conversation between two ruling elders over the barbecue grill about the difference in the mean density of hamburger versus steak, and how one would calculate the corresponding difference in cooking times? I have a friend here who describes these phenomena as "LAPD", which stands for "Los Alamos Personality Disorder." You can take the man out of the laboratory, but you can't take the scientist out of the man!