Expecting the Impossible
A recent survey showed that over sixty percent of British adults expect the impossible from science.
Well, we are seeing some fantastic things these days. Forty years after the invention of the laser, we’re carrying around compact disc players. Twenty-five years after the advent of fibre optics, we’re making speedy connections on the internet.
One of the most exciting developments in physics today is the field of atomic optics. The optics you learned at school involved mirrors and lenses to manipulate light. Atomic optics switches things around, and uses laser light to manipulate atoms.
Physicists can now cool atoms down close to the lowest temperature that is theoretically possible - about a million times colder than interstellar space. Under these conditions, atoms exhibit strange behaviour. Rather than acting as particles, they behave as waves with wave lengths as long as that of visible light. This means that scientists can do things with atoms that we normally do with light.
As the techniques of atomic optics are perfected, atomic holography may well make it possible to make real three dimensional replicas of objects, so that we’ll be able to copy objects, not just pictures on paper. So perhaps these survey results are not far off the mark, and we will see some seemingly impossible things come from science.
So next time you read science fiction, keep an open mind, some of those fantasies may soon become facts.
Have you ever considered that what was impossible years ago - or even yesterday - has now become a possibility? Advances in science have changed the way we live. Technology has brought us the ability to communicate with each other via the Internet. Medicine has introduced new drugs and treatments that were the stuff of science fiction not that long ago. Aeronautics has put mankind and satellites into space. Yet these next decades will unlock knowledge and foster discoveries so that today’s impossibilities will be tomorrow’s regular fare. This is a miraculous era in which to live.
Some things are still unexplained. Others may never be explained - they remain in the realm of the unexplainable. One scientist at an American university recently commented that the really brilliant scientists acknowledge that the more they study the field of science, the more they recognize how little they really know. The more one knows, the more humble one grows in the face of what remains to be known. Perhaps it is a sign of the beginner that, having learned some, he or she believes him or herself to have a respectable grasp of the whole.
Miracles are one of those categories of the impossible. Perhaps we can describe what happened but not why it occurred or how it happened. Sometimes the unexplained rests in the timing of an event. Or the unexplained could be the persons or the place of the miracle.
Science tends to consider miracles as events just now unexplainable. But one day... But even if we were able to dissect a miracle and understand the mechanics, there are still other loose ends to tie up.
Is there still a sense of awe and mystery in your view of the world?
The miracles in the Bible bring a variety of responses from readers today. Some think that mass hysteria prevailed. Or hypnotism. Perhaps these ancient peoples were suffering from psychosomatic ailments which were alleviated by a powerful figure such as Jesus. However, it is difficult to explain away the numbers and kinds of miracles performed - lifelong disease, weather, death.
It is true that we see and accept what we are already predisposed to believe. However, when the evidence is investigated, we may find ourselves convinced in unexpected ways. Former Chicago Tribune legal editor, Lee Strobel, a confirmed atheist who set out to discredit the legend of Jesus, found himself confronted with surprising evidence to the contrary. In his book “The Case for Christ”, he concludes: In light of the convincing facts which I had learned during my investigation, in the face of this overwhelming avalanche of evidence in the case for Christ, the great irony was this: it would require much more faith for me to maintain my atheism than to trust Jesus of Nazareth!
David Humphreys and Debbie Hughes
© August 2004
