{"id":35,"date":"2010-05-09T19:59:12","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T14:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/?p=35"},"modified":"2010-05-16T03:07:43","modified_gmt":"2010-05-15T22:07:43","slug":"35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"This I Believe Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"

This I Believe Essay<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I believe in the undiscovered.\u00a0 I never cease to be amazed at the overpowering arrogance of prominent, well-educated citizens as to their omnipotence.\u00a0 If I spend much time listening to the media or academics, it seems easy to come away with the impression that current civilization knows just about all the important stuff; that no significant mysteries remain.\u00a0 The current laws of nature and logic explain all, reveal all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Except they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Science still struggles to explain the absence of a \u201cGrand Unification Theory.\u201d\u00a0 Such a theory would harmonize our scientific laws for very small objects with the apparently inconsistent laws for very large objects.\u00a0 As Stephen Hawking still searches, he notes in A Brief History of Time<\/em> that there seems too little matter in the universe to prevent it from flying apart.\u00a0 This missing \u201cdark matter\u201d remains a theoretical mystery.\u00a0 A the other end of the spectrum, quantum mechanics tells us that there is a one in a billion chance that you could walk through a solid wall.\u00a0 How magnificent!<\/p>\n

Shakespeare spoke of the \u201cundiscovered country\u201d as the future.\u00a0 Yet, we today live in an \u201cundiscovered country.\u201d\u00a0 While popular culture leads us to conclude that anyone clinging to any spiritual notion qualifies as a rube or wishful thinker, one of the world\u2019s top molecular scientists, Francis Collins, the leader of the U.S. Genome Project, finds the \u201cLanguage of God\u201d in the DNA code of the human genome.\u00a0 He fully embraces both the science of evolution and the scientific possibility of God.\u00a0 C.S. Lewis speculated over 50 years ago that Jesus Christ represented a new direction in evolution, a curious mix of science and spirituality.<\/p>\n

Physics now shares with us that according to \u201cString Theory\u201d there may be as many as 14 dimensions to reality, even though we perceive only three (height, width, depth) in addition to the passing of time.\u00a0 Gravity may only \u201cpartially\u201d be in our reality, and this explains why it is such a weak force compared to, say, electromagnetism.\u00a0 What might exist in dimensions we can\u2019t perceive?\u00a0 How fanciful!\u00a0 Yet, is this any stranger than the binary number system which has now evolved into the coursing streams of billions of bytes of \u201don-off\u201d signals\u00a0 that make up the wonders of the Internet?\u00a0 Those who worked with computers in the early 1960\u2019s surely didn\u2019t imagine what would ultimately be discovered in computer science by the early part of the 21st<\/sup> Century.<\/p>\n

As so much remains to be discovered, I retain both my sense of awe, and my realization that wild claims and beliefs remain potentially realized as tomorrow\u2019s scientific fact, and logically inescapable reality.\u00a0 This makes me humble, but also supremely joyful.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2009\u2014David J. Carr<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This I Believe Essay \u00a0 I believe in the undiscovered.\u00a0 I never cease to be amazed at the overpowering arrogance of prominent, well-educated citizens as to their omnipotence.\u00a0 If I spend much time listening to the media or academics, it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidjcarr.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}