When Reason Outruns Imagination

Think about the word "imagination." How does it make you feel? What images does it call to mind? If you're like me, it's full of positive associations. I think of artists and inventors, bright colors, and imagined adventures. When I do an image search for "imagination," I see that it evokes the same images for others. The word "imagination" seems to capture the imagination.

Now think of the word "reason" or "reasoning." That one isn't dressed in such glowing colors, is it? It's a colder, more serious concept. It evokes images of numbers, logic, machines with gears, and maybe Rodin's The Thinker. When I do the image search for "reasoning", I see once again that others think of the same kind of things. It's not nearly the feel-good word that "imagination" is. The difference corresponds to the pop psychology notion of the logical left brain and creative right brain, as exemplified in this Mercedes Benz ad:

Click for credits. From adsoftheworld.com

People tend to think of imagination and reason as somehow opposed, and many of them fall firmly on the side of imagination. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. First, imagination and reason are partners, not opponents. The two are inextricably linked, and the best breakthroughs in reasoning require leaps of the imagination. Second, reason sometimes outruns imagination. Oddly enough, reason tells us the world is more fantastic than we can clearly imagine.

I realized this the other day after reading a famous quote by John Playfair, a Scottish mathematician and scientist. Playfair was a frequent companion of the pioneering geologist James Hutton on Hutton's geologic excursions, and he wrote a book that popularized Hutton's ideas. One day in 1788, Playfair and Hutton took a boat trip to a place on the Scottish coast known as Siccar Point. At this spot, as the picture shows, near-horizontal layers of rock sit on top of other layers that are nearly vertical. It's a geologic feature known as an angular unconformity. Honestly, it doesn't look like much. It's certainly not going to become an internet meme, like the Mercedes ad did. But they truly do represent something incredible. To see it, you have to understand the story they tell. And that requires imagination as well as reason.

Photo by Dave Souza. Click for credits. 

Hutton did the reasoning long ago, so try to imagine--really imagine--what Hutton told Playfair. He explained that vertical rock layers you see on the right were originally horizontal, because they formed from sediments at the bottom of an ancient sea. Since then, they have been turned to stone, and then lifted and tilted sideways as part of the formation of an ancient mountain range. It was just as solid and long-lasting as the mountain ranges we see today, but now it's long gone. The mountains began to erode as soon as the rose, just as mountains are doing today. After ages and ages, they were eroded down to a flat surface--the top surface of the vertical rocks. Then they were covered by a new sea, which deposited a layer of horizontal sediments on the older surface of the vertical ones. Then those sediments turned to stone, and were lifted up above the water and began to erode, finally exposing some of the rocks they were built upon.

The more you think about how much time all this would have required, the more you realize awe-inspiring it is. As Playfair would later recall: "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time." That's the famous part of his quote, and it gets repeated all the time in discussions of deep geologic time. What he said next is less poetic, but perhaps just as profound: "and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow."

Hutton's explanation of Siccar Point was perfectly reasonable, but hard to imagine. It's hard to even believe. In fact, many people to this day--over 40% in the United States--refuse to believe the Earth could be that old. But Hutton's ideas have stood the test of time. Reason has shown us a world more vast than our imaginations can capture.

That's not the only time it's happened, either. Look up some winter night at Betelgeuse, the red star that defines one of Orion's shoulders. Science, evidence, and reason tell us that Betelgeuse is unbelievably huge--billions of sun-sized stars could fit inside it. It's even more unbelievably far away--roughly 635 light years, which means the light we now see from it has been traveling toward us since the late Middle Ages. Of course, light is no slowpoke--it can cross the United States many times in the blink of an eye. Light goes that fast, and takes it hundreds of years to make the journey from Betelgeuse to Earth. Once again, reason has gone further than my imagination can venture to follow. And that's just the beginning. That same beam of light would take over 100,000 years to cross our galaxy, which is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe.

Of course, it's not just the scale of the universe that surpasses our imagination. Its sheer weirdness is also enough to short circuit our brains. Einstein used cold, hard, mathematical reason to show that space and time are bound up together into a unified, four-dimensional spacetime, and that gravity is a curvature in spacetime. Can you visualize something curving in four dimensions? I can't, and I bet you can't either, but spacetime goes ahead and curves anyway. We know it does, because we can look through a telescope and see it. A few days ago, NASA released a Hubble image of what looked like a smiley face in deep space. Its eyes are two galaxies (each containing more stars than you could count in a lifetime), while the apparent rings that define the face are the distorted images of even more distant galaxies. The gravitational field of the galaxies in the middle is curving spacetime and thus bending the light from the more distant galaxies, the same way a fisheye lens distorts what we see through it. We're looking through a fisheye lens hundreds of thousands of light years across, made of spacetime itself.

Why do we know this is true? And how were we able to put a telescope in space that can spot these things? Because of reason. AND because of imagination. Both are necessary. Einstein had to do some intense formal reasoning to come up with his theory of relativity, but he also had to have a vivid imagination. He often imagined riding on a beam of light, trying to visualize how the universe would look from such a vantage point. Similarly, Hutton needed reasoning to figure out the history and implications of Siccar Point, but he also needed to imagine ancient mountains and oceans. He needed to contemplate expanses of time that most people would dismiss as preposterous. For the Hubble telescope to become a reality, somebody first had to imagine launching a telescope into space. And then a whole lot of people had do a lot of very precise mathematical reasoning to actually put that telescope there. Now it captures images that capture imaginations around the world. Reason and imagination are partners, and they can do far more together than apart.

So, while imagination is a wonderful thing, we should also give reason its due. Imagination alone can take us to fantastic worlds that exist only in the mind. That's great, as long was we don't confuse them with the real world. But reason combined with imagination can tell us how fantastic the real world can be. It's told us again and again that the universe is far more vast and strange than we ever could guessed based on imagination alone. It's even told us things about the universe that we haven't found ways to imagine. So, perhaps we should celebrate reason as much as imagination, and stop thinking of it as boring and colorless. Reason is imagination's partner in showing us what a big, fabulous world we really live in.

Under the High Plains Sea

The other day I wrote a post called Why I Believe Crazy Things. My point was that science is full of ideas that sound just as crazy as anything you'll find on the "Strange Phenomena" shelves in the New Age section of a bookstore. If you think about it, the idea that the universe exploded into existence from a single, tiny point sounds crazier than the idea that bigfoot roams the Pacific Northwest. It's just that in science, we also have evidence for those crazy ideas. There's solid evidence for the Big Bang, but not for the Big Foot.

Another point I've often made lately is that science lets you see beyond surface appearances and find marvels in what might otherwise seem mundane. A house down the street from me, for example, is made of an unexceptional-looking rock that was formed in a single cataclysmic day, when red-hot volcanic ash came roaring out of the mountains and buried what's now Castle Rock, Colorado. The rock doesn't look that interesting, but it is when you look beyond the surface.

So, two points: 1. Science shows you the stories beyond surface appearances. 2. Those stories are often really bizarre.

The other day, I came across a good example of both of these of these points. The crappy little cellphone picture above shows a section of high plains just southeast of Colorado Springs. The little bumps are known as the Tepee Buttes. They're not very impressive, even in good pictures. They're only about thirty feet high, and if you turn and look the other way, you'll see Pikes Peak in all its magnificence. So why notice them at all?

They're worth noticing because if you know the science behind them--if you go beyond surface appearances--you find one of those bizarre, hard to believe stories. It turns out that those little buttes sitting there on a mile-high plain, were once communities of freaky creatures living on the bottom of the sea. This was about 75 million years ago, when a shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway covered what's now the North American plains.

"Lamellibrachia luymesi" (Click for photo credits)

Each butte marks the location of an ancient sea floor vent called a cold seep, where methane and other chemicals would seep out of the the ground. Some bacteria (then and now) can live on those chemicals--they basically "eat" methane and hydrogen sulfide. As they did so, they created growing mounds of limestone on a seafloor that was otherwise mostly mud. That's why the buttes are now limestone outcrops in the middle of a great expanse of shale. But it wasn't just bacteria. There are (then and now) clams and tubeworms that form symbiotic relationships with the bacteria, so they too can live solely on methane or hydrogen sulfide. The photo to the right shows a modern cold seep community in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's weird enough that there are communities of bacteria, clams, and tubeworms on the seafloor today, living on chemicals leaking out of the ground. But it's even weirder that there are fossil versions of these communities on the high, dry plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

So why believe such a tall tale? Because you can go out to the Tepee Buttes and dig up fossils of the clams and tubeworms. If you have the right equipment, you can slice open the rocks and find fossils of the bacteria that formed the backbone of the community. The evidence is right there, solid as a rock, because it IS rock.

Of course, a lot has happened since Colorado was a shallow sea. A few million years after the Tepee Buttes were living seafloor communities, tectonic forces from the west coast started reaching the interior of the continent, and the Rocky Mountains began to rise. All of Colorado--mountains and plains--were gradually lifted high above sea level. But the Tepee Buttes still sit there, telling us how the high plains were once a sea floor. They're more interesting than they look, and when you look beyond surface appearances, the tale they tell is truly strange. Strange, but true.

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Tepee Buttes: Late Cretaceous Submarine Springs of El Paso and Pueblo County

Tepee Buttes on our Horizons

Sacred Enough to Kill For

*Note: Re-posted after the murder of secularist writer Avijit Roy in Bangladesh; a man brave enough to think and write freely even though he knew what the consequences might be. RIP

It is putting a very high value on one's conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them. - Michel de Montaigne

Today in Paris, three Islamic radicals walked into the office of a satirical newspaper called Charlie Hebdo and gunned down several unarmed people. Why? Because the newspaper had published cartoons depicting Muhammad and mocking radical Islam. During the attack, the gunmen shouted, "God is great!" and, "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad."

It didn't matter that the newspaper mocked absolutely everybody, or that Muhammad has been dead for over a thousand years. These men believe there are certain ideas and certain people who simply cannot be mocked. And they believe anyone who does mock them deserves to die. They believe it so fervently they were willing to pick up guns and murder them themselves.

In other words, they didn't murder them for killing or raping anyone, or for stealing, or anything like that. They murdered them over a set of unproven, hypothetical ideas..

Nobody has ever proven that God/Allah exists, or that Muhammad was his prophet, or that God wants his followers to kill anyone who insults him or his representatives. There's no hard evidence of any of that. There are just claims made in a very old book, and it's as easy to make false claims in a book as true ones. In fact, it's far easier. That's no less true if the book is old, and venerated by multitudes. Millions of people once believed what the Iliad said about Athena, and some of them would have killed me for saying she doesn't exist. But she doesn't.

The tragic situation, then, is that 12 people were murdered today for daring to mock a set of unproven hypotheses. What's even more tragic is that millions of people throughout history have been murdered for the same reason, and by many other religions besides Islam. What's unusual about modern Islam is not that it has so many violent extremists, but that it still does.* The Montaigne quote at the beginning of this essay comes from a time when people in the west were routinely roasted alive for their beliefs.

History has shown that the ideas people are most willing to kill each other over are also the ones they are least able to prove. There's nothing in this entire world more disheartening to me than that. How could anybody be so sure of their beliefs that they're willing to kill another human being just for challenging them? Let's face it: whether he exists or not, God is invisible. You can't point to him, like you might point to the moon, and say, "See, there he is." Yet people aren't generally killed for denying the existence of undeniable things--the members of the Flat Earth Society don't need to fear for their lives--but people are killed for denying the existence of an invisible entity. That strikes me as insane. Common, but insane.

No idea is so sacred to me that I would kill somebody for questioning or mocking it. Life is far too short and precious, and the human mind is far too easily fooled. It's too easy to be wrong. [This past week, millions of people were shocked to discover they couldn't even agree on whether a dress was black and blue or white and gold.]

If I looked up in the sky and saw a great heavenly figure holding a tablet that said, "I am the Lord thy God. Kill anyone who insults me!", I would assume I had gone nuts. If a billion other people saw it and videotaped it, and it ran on the evening news, I would say, "Well, how do we know that was really God? And if it was, why would he say that? Isn't he supposed to be all-powerful and utterly good? Why would a being like that be so sensitive to insults as to wish death on his own creations? And why did he give us a mind if he didn't want us asking questions like that?" I simply can't imagine any evidence that would convince me that people should be murdered for mocking an idea (or a powerful, God-like being...should one ever unambiguously appear.)

Some ideas are surely worth dying for, but no idea is sacred enough to kill for. At least, not simply for questioning or mocking it. In fact, human ideas must be questioned, or we'll never be able to separate the good ones from the bad ones. That means all ideas; even the ones people hold sacred. If they're true, they can withstand the questioning. Besides, maybe the "sacredness" of some ideas is, as Douglas Adams suggested, an evolved characteristic of some ideologies--a kind of self-protective mechanism, like a tortoise's shell. Maybe it hasn't persisted because it's true, but because it says, "If you mess with me, I'll hurt you." That's how chain letters spread. Has the persistence of chain letters ever been an indicator of their truth? Maybe the ideas that need questioned most are those that have been hiding under that shell that says, "Don't question me."

In the paragraph above, after I wrote the phrase "sacred enough to kill for", I looked back at it and shuddered. What a truly awful phrase--the very idea is perverse and even oxymoronic. It's also tragically common. It may be one of the worst ideas humankind has ever had. Like all bad ideas, it needs to be thrown onto that vast pile of history's other horrible notions. And we shouldn't mourn it when it's gone, because no idea is too sacred to question, much less sacred enough to kill for. Life is what's really sacred.

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I'm not saying the history of religion has been nothing but violence. Religion seems to have a strange tendency to bring out the best AND worst in people. People have also done great and kind things in the name of the same religions that others have killed for.