Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

its called progressive learning...prolly something that at your age is hard to do, I got that to (sic).

What Chief Justice Roberts Misunderstands About Physics

Late in his life, Albert Einstein published the nearest he ever came to an autobiography. It’s scant on actual details of his life, on his triumphs and fiascos, loves and losses. Instead, Einstein wrote an account of what a life in science offers those who commit to it.

Like any good quest story, Einstein’s begins with sense of something missing. “Even when I was a fairly precocious young man,” he wrote, “the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chase most men restlessly through life came to my consciousness with considerable vitality.” Against that void Einstein discovered that “out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.” From the time he was 12, he wrote, “The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation.”

I thought of that credo when I read about a pending Supreme Court case called Fisher v. University of Texas, where the court is set to decide whether the university’s affirmative-action policy unfairly promotes less-qualified minority students over white ones. During oral argument, Justice Scalia’s suggestion that a softer, kinder separate-but-equal system might be sufficient for African Americans drew most of the immediate backlash—as it should have. But it was Chief Justice Roberts who made the more subtle attack on the concept of diversity, when he asked “what unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” before musing, “I’m just wondering what the benefits of diversity are in that situation.”

Roberts seems to be suggesting that physics is a realm apart from say, the humanities, where unique cultural perspectives would be more obviously valuable—and in doing so, he gives voice to a widely held misconception about science. Roberts’s error is to treat physics as a discipline that sits outside its own history and the larger culture, when of course it does no such thing.

This was not the view of physics that 70-year-old Albert Einstein described as he looked back across his own life experience. Most of his not-really-an-autobiography limns the evolution of his thinking about his two theories of relativity. In describing the paradox that led him to his early breakthrough, the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein noted that it took him a decade to get from his first thoughts to the final theory. (He started at 16, so he has some excuse.) The breakthrough turned on his realization that measurements of time and space aren’t absolute. Rather, they shift for different observers depending on how they’re moving relative to each other.

As he struggled to finish the theory, Einstein found that “even scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices.” Einstein himself had to reach out of physics to develop the habits of mind that allowed him to see past the prejudices that obscured the relativistic universe he ultimately discovered. “The type of critical reasoning which was required for the discovery of this central point” he wrote, “was decisively furthered, in my case especially, by the reading of David Hume’s and Ernst Mach’s philosophical writings.”