We can take Mandelbrot’s scalar analysis of coastlines and apply it to the concept of Earth’s “roundness.” At ant level, the planet appears to be an impossibly huge, intricately detailed web of high and deep places—worlds in a forest, forests in a lawn. At human scale, the lawn becomes a plush green carpet, a forest becomes a canopied home and source for food, and mountains tower over the comparatively flat, human-shaped landscapes into the celestial bowl of sky. At mountain scale, Earth’s curvature becomes readily apparent toward the horizon. The atmosphere exists on a far larger scale yet. Beneath it lays a slightly pear-shaped, bulbous mass with a pleasant, average roughness to it. And, seen full from deep space…well, you will experience that later.
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Be a Druidic Moon watcher. Through painstakingly long observation, day after day, month after month, year after year, you are not only able to anticipate the phases of the Moon, you also know that the moon follows a complex seasonal cycle moving north and south, and that some unknown force seems to draw the Moon closer to Earth and away during a separate cycle.
But this doesn’t lead you astray. You know that tonight is the night of the next full lunar eclipse. You are ready. You watch as Earth’s circular shadow advances across the face of the Moon. And at that very moment, you realize for the first time that you’ve seen a reflection of the true shape of your home.
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Notwithstanding Wipond’s fairly accurate criticism of scientific hubris and error over the centuries, I firmly reject his rejection of the scientific method. At its core, science can only offer tentative descriptions of reality and predictions of its future state. It says, “Do not block the way of inquiry.” But science doesn’t end there. It lays out techniques and procedures that allow scientists to modify and replace descriptions and predictions that no longer suffice. It allows the human imagination to slowly edge its way from fantasy to reality. This method of trial and error isn’t a weakness; it’s science’s greatest strength.
All descriptions we humans have ever made or can make about the universe and predictions of its future state are, at least in principle, falsifiable. The notion that some notion can be proven wrong is an extraordinary notion. We don’t think of it as odd because we live in a scientific culture. We’re used to it. But falsifiability created a radical disjunction between scientific and religious thought. When the Sun shines or the wind blows, a religious person will say it’s God’s will. Never mind the specifics, ignore cause and effect; God did it. Religious pronouncements end all inquiry and nothing more need be learned.
On the other hand, when an astronomer observes a solar flare during an eclipse or a meteorologist detects high winds coming ahead of a large storm system from the west by using Doppler radar, those two scientists will not assume that the Sun is Ra riding his glowing chariot or the wind is the breath of Zeus. The astronomer will seek out patterns of causation within solar convections and the eleven-year sunspot cycle. The meteorologist will record the wind velocity and direction around the churning thunderstorm for a television weather report and for future analysis. They will always assume that a physical cause precedes a physical effect. They will break down complex events into smaller, more understandable parts, trying to uncover a deeper underlying pattern in such interactions between energy and matter.
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Be a surveyor in the American wilderness. The Confederation Congress under the old Articles of Confederation mandated the orderly incorporation of new lands into your new country under the Northwest Ordinance. The new Constitution also mandated the creation of new states, equal to the old, out of the Northwest Territory and any other new territories that would be incorporated later. In order to fulfill these mandates, you and your fellow surveyors were employed to create detailed maps and to lay down a grid of rectangles within rectangles—range, township, section—in order to provide readily saleable land to the public.