"All we want are the facts, ma'am."

"All we want are the facts, ma'am." --Joe Friday

I have been attending a series of lectures at the University, presented by the Physics department: "Rethinking Reality".

It is odd to realize how much the word "reality" is in contrast to the mood of our time. To use the most obnoxious example, some politicians find it comfortable to speak of "alternative facts". That is to say, to assert non-facts--just an assertion--as a fact, as if one can simply choose what to call a fact, as one might choose to wear a red-white-and blue tie instead of a green one.

It is even stranger to recognize that a couple thousand people are crowding into Centennial Hall for each lecture, as if there were no alternative facts, at all: just facts.

Once upon a long time ago--before there was grass--I sat in a Sunday School class thinking about Moses crossing the Red Sea, or Jesus walking on water, and thought to myself: "The world doesn't work that way." Nobody ever just told water to Cecil-B.-DeMille-itself like two walls so that Moses could walk to the Promised Land, and short of ice skating time, no one ever walked on water, either. The world doesn't work that way.

It is very important that we try to understand how the world does work. And because we are constantly learning more and more about the world, we--almost constantly--have to rethink reality. Like learning that the universe is incredibly old, and enormous, or that nothing can exceed the speed of light, we are constantly pressed by our own desire to understand what is real.

The lecture series is an attempt by the University Physics Department to explain in ordinary language what we know about reality. If we do not begin with what we know to be true, we can as well spend our time looking for the ring that will bind them all, and throw it into Mt. Doom. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but such a ring is a fairy tale. I loved the Lord of the Rings, and still do, but I know the world does not work that way; not really. I cannot walk on that water.

Comments

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