Thought for the day

Here's a photo of the plutonium core of the "fat-man" bomb being carried by scientist Harold Agnew and about to be sent off to be dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. We all know how that story ended but still, it's amazing and shocking to think that the atoms in that little box killed around 40,000 people in a single instant and another 40,000 later from horrific after-effects, even more incredible to realise that only a single gram (1/30th of an ounce) of the material in that box got converted into explosive energy, such is the power of truly understanding our material world.

The chain of events leading up to the detonation of this bomb was, to all intents and purposes, infinitely complex, involving the outcomes of billions of interactions between different Human Beings and the trillions of neurons connecting inside their brains. From the circumstances leading to the parents of Harry Truman having sex at the precise moment they did through to the discovery of nuclear fission by German scientists in the 30s, through to the invention of an aircraft that was capable of dropping it and the final irony that the primary target was obscured by cloud that day and so Nagasaki was selected instead (how random can it get!). This is the fundamental nature of our material reality, it defies simple explanations.

Our greatest challenge as a species however is that we prefer simple explanations. For example it would be easy for me (as an atheist) to assert that this weapon was developed, paid for and delivered by a CHRISTIAN president residing over a CHRISTIAN country, therefore CHRISTIANS should be blamed! See how identity politics (aka gross-over-simplification) works? Religion also seeks to simplify reality, a topical example of this would be the apparently inhuman views of Jacob Rees-Mogg who believes that abortion is wrong, even in cases of rape and incest. Why does he believe this? Because his "Christian" God says so - a huge (and laughable) oversimplification of the human experience if ever I heard one, fortunately not all Christians think this way. To blame all Christians for such egregious simplifications would of course be ridiculous, in exactly the same way it would be ridiculous to assert that atheism was the cause of the millions of deaths during Stalin's great purge, i.e. just because Stalin was an atheist. 

Sadly though many people these days seem content to play this game. We often hear that our current woes are the fault of "immigrants" or "black-people" or "nationalists" or "the EU"; such simplifications aren't useful unless, of course, you wish to exploit the gullible. Unfortunately many politicians and rabble-rousers (including religious leaders) leverage popular simplifications (like the insane simplification that "hurricanes are punishments from God") to further then own agendas even when such ideas work against the long-term interests, well-being and cohesion of the majority. Whatever the final facts of reality are, the denial of global warming and Brexit would be good examples of this kind of exploitation using simplifications, in fact you could probably argue that we are now in a golden age of over-simplification trumping reality (pun intended).

The only antidote to falling for this kind of over-simplification is reason and skepticism. Don't believe things just because they sound simple or come from authority or suit your wishes and/or biases. Of course this is easy to say and yet hard to do; often the right answer isn't the popular one or the one that people would most wish to be true. Whatever simple answer (i.e. supernatural being) you attribute surviving hurricane Harvey to, you have to also blame that same entity for causing the storm in the first place, i.e. you've explained precisely nothing! Far better we go to school, learn some science, learn some philosophy, work hard and hopefully someone will figure out how to build ever more precise climate models that can be tested against reality. Then, if the model-predictions match up with what we observe, you know we're making progress in explaining reality.