Susan Jacoby on the 'myth of separate magisteria' [science & religion]

Susan Jacoby, author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," has penned a piece for Big Questions Online in which she asks the question: Can—and should—science and religion avoid each other's turf.

Taking the late Stephen Jay Gould's to task on his description of the two disciplines as "non-overlapping magisteria," Jacoby wonders why so many intellectuals now pay obeisance to the "historically absurd idea of separate domains for science and religion."

...scientists use embryonic stem cells in research aimed at developing treatments for currently incurable scourges of the body. Some church leaders, primarily Roman Catholics and conservative American Protestants, are doing everything they can to impede the research because their faith tells them that a six-day-old embryo is the equivalent of a person — and that destroying the cells for scientific purposes is murder.

The biomedical researcher who wants to continue working with embryonic stem cells is making a moral as well as a scientific judgment, and the cleric is making a judgment that constrains science. The domains have overlapped since science first began making discoveries that could promote, or, for that matter, threaten human welfare. When Dr. Edward Jenner developed an early form of vaccination against smallpox in 1796, many orthodox Christians — the most notable of whom was Yale’s president, the Rev. Timothy Dwight — considered vaccination an intrusion on God’s plan, which supposedly required the ancient killer disease.

Citing Sam Harris's recent book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values," she lauds the recent insights brought forth by the neurosciences, and suggests that we should reject both religious notions of revealed truth and the secular veneration of moral relativism. Instead, argues Jacoby, we should look to science which has a crucial role to play in assessing moral values according to their observable earthly consequences:

Numerous social science studies have shown, for example, that countries where women are forbidden to educate themselves, earn a living, or control their sexual lives are the poorest societies on earth by any objective measure of well-being — from health to poverty rates. How, then, can it be morally sound — regardless of whether people believe they are doing the will of God — to subjugate women?

In this instance, the cop-out for the separate magisteria establishment is that religions restricting the freedom of women must be “false.” Those who uphold the notion of separate domains want domain over values for their religion — not all religion.

Neuroscience raises a red flag because it attempts to explain human behavior by studying the physical brain rather than by evoking the existence of a independent, non-physical soul. The idea that humans may not possess free will in the religious or secular senses — at least not to the degree we would like — is as threatening to our sense of human specialness today as Darwin’s theory of evolution was in his time.

Read more.

Science considered

Caught some articles today about declining faith in science and how different individuals are more prone to reject or accept certain scientific discoveries:

• Plenty of today’s scientific theories will one day be discredited. So should we be sceptical of science itself?: "There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. But there is an awkward public-relations challenge for any champion of hard-nosed science. When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism—all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be—they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is. When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong." - Anthony Gottlieb, The Limits of Science.
• Individuals with competing cultural values disagree about what most scientists believe: "We know from previous research that people with individualistic values, who have a strong attachment to commerce and industry, tend to be skeptical of claimed environmental risks, while people with egalitarian values, who resent economic inequality, tend to believe that commerce and industry harms the environment." - Dan Kahan, Why 'scientific consensus' fails to persuade.
• In addition to this, it's turning out that more women than men accept climate change.

Science to the rescue! Helping the Chilean miners survive their ordeal

Quite a story developing in Chile: the 33 miners who are trapped 700 meters underground will have to wait about four months before they are rescued. That's obviously not going to be easy on the men who have been trapped for over 18 days already. Keeping it together psychologically, physically and socially for that extent of time will undoubtedly prove challenging.

But this is where science can step in and help. While this incident is dreadful for all those involved, it'll be an extraordinary opportunity to apply our knowledge and help these guys cope with the extreme isolation — and at the same time learn from it. The whole experience will serve as an important case study across several scientific disciplines.

This is why NASA has been called in to help. The space agency obviously has tremendous experience and expertise managing extended bouts of isolation, both from physiological and psychological perspectives. While it's still early days, NASA has already recommended that the men keep exercising and adopt a routine where days are separated from nights.

As noted, the two primary areas of concern are the men's physical and psychological health. While food and supplies are now being routed through a six inch tunnel, there are still extreme limitations in terms of limited social contact and the problem of having so many men live in such close quarters. They are living without natural sunlight and the temperature is hovering around 29.5°C (81°F).

Compounding this is the stress the men must feel; avoiding an impending sense of doom and bouts of claustrophobia can't be easy. I myself suffer from mild claustrophobia and my stomach tightens at the very thought. As of today, at least five of the men are experiencing severe depression. Chilean officials have already sent down anti-depressants to help the miners cope — though the miners have reportedly asked for some beer. Advisors have made it clear that the men, in order to keep it together, must maintain a healthy sense of optimism. How this can be achieved is easier said than done, but regular contact with the surface and frequent updates about the rescue effort will go a long way.

From a social psychology standpoint, it's interesting to note that the men appear to be in good spirits. They've also put the Lord of the Flies myth to rest; soon after the ordeal started they began organizing themselves. They're holding daily meetings, assigning tasks, and portioning out rations (they actually made three days of rations last 17 days). Their ability to self-organize and maintain order given such extreme circumstances is proving to be as fascinating as it is praiseworthy.

NASA has suggested that the miners do regular exercises to prevent muscle atrophy as they await extraction. This will prove beneficial from not just a health standpoint, but from a psychological one as well; it's well documented that exercise tends to improve mood. There's also word that, in addition to food and medicine, other items such as flashlights and games are being sent down. It's also very likely that they will be given sun lamps to help simulate natural sunlight. Otherwise, it's very likely that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) will kick in.

Scientists will undoubtedly learn from this episode and eventually apply the learnings to such things as a future expedition to Mars. The data will likely compliment that of the Mars isolation study currently underway in Russia. In this experiment, a crew of six volunteers are isolated from the outside world in a space measuring just 550 cubic meters.

Again, I hope that everything will turn out for the best and that this story has a happy ending.

Followup on Haiti, Science, Brinstuff and the Enlightenment!

David Brin is a Sentient Developments guest blogger.

Salon Magazine asked to publish as a main article an updated version of my essay about reconstruction in Haiti, wherein I suggest the establishment of clear corridors for every kind of right-of-way, across the capital city—mass transit, sewer, water, electricity, fiber-optics, even WiFi can go in cheap, if all pathway issues are settled at once—so that the skeleton and sinew and bloodstream of a vibrant city can arise... leaving all the subsequent details to Haitians. Drop in and give the essay traffic! Comment if you like.

And hold on till the end for one of my mini-essays about "The Enlightenment and It's Enemies" !

And on the Transparency front... See the les professional kind of police behaving exactly as predicted in The Transparent Society. “Since the police beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991, men in blue have looked warily at the civilian videotaping of arrests and other police activities. Some cops are so opposed to the practice, they've begun arresting the amateur videographers and charging them criminally.” In fact, nearly all such arrests have been dismissed. The important thing now is to make all police aware of that fact, so that continuing to do this becomes knowing and culpable false arrest.

==== A Holocene Grant Proposal ===

Any educators out there... or folks interested in creative new approaches to interface... here’s something interesting you might browse. "HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation are excited to launch the third year of the Digital Media and Learning Competition. Today, young people are learning, socializing, and participating in civic life in dramatic new ways and assessing information in ways never before imagined."

I have a small consortium that has submitted an application for a grant to develop breakthrough “collaboration ware” to help students do team projects (a big part of the modern American curriculum) with vastly more efficiency and fun.

And now my request from some of you. Public commenting on the 2010 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition is now open! Join the conversation. Log in to provide feedback and comments on applications and see how others are reacting to your application. Register to add your comments at: http://dmlcompetition.net/pligg/register.php by creating a user name and password (please note the user name and password you created to submit an application will not work; all users must create new logins). You will receive an activation e-mail, with a link to confirm your address, and can then log in to the system. Take a look at as many of the brief 50-word project descriptions as you can. If something looks interesting, you can either read more (a 300-word description) or save it and come back later for a closer look.Once you’ve taken a look, we encourage you to discuss (post a comment) or tell a friend.

Favorable comments on our “TeamBuilder” proposal are, of course, most welcome!

=== SCIENCE MISC ====

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body. The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on. (BTW... I showed humans doing this in Heart of the Comet.)

Have you heard of Rav Patel? In his book The Value of Nothing, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all need to survive. Though, of course, there probably is some vegetarian bias in there!

UPDATE on AUDIO BOOKS from audible.com. See these great Brin titles available in audio version to listen-to during your commute!

=== Defending the Enlightenment = a mini-essay ===

See a fascinating review of The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition by Zeev Sternhell, in which the Israeili philosopher covers a vital topic, resonant with many things I’ve been saying about how the progressive Enlightenment is under frenetic attack, by those scheming to restore older, oppressive ways...

... only with an important difference that prompts me to offer up an observation and a cavil. For, when I speak of the “Enlightenment” I am referring to something much more modern and ongoing that what campus academics refer-to, when they use that word. To me, it stands for the great experiment of Western Civilization, the sole time that any post-agricultural society discovered a viable alternative to the age-old human attractor state, the standard pattern that dominated perhaps 99% of cultures since history began -- rule by inherited oligarchy.

Yes, our current experiment evolved out of the French Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau. But what we have today—and must defend against concerted assault—is only related to that drawing room debating society, as a child is to its grandparent.

Indeed, had the Enlightenment depended only upon its French-Idealist wing, whose love of abstraction sometimes borders on the mystical, the movement would long ago have foundered. It is the Anglo-Scot-American offshoot, with its emphasis on pragmatism, reductionist science, “otherness” inclusionism and material progress in the physical world, that truly changed the world. It is this wing that kept the Enlightenment alive, by powerfully resisting and then quelling the fascist and Stalinist empires. It also was responsible for spreading both practical advancement and modernist ideals to all corners of the globe.

This is an important distinction. For, while the French and American branches of the Enlightenment share many values -- a belief in progress, in human improvability, in divided and accountable power, in free argument and in the value of the individual—the more abstract French wing turns about and partakes in a kind of madness that is rooted in bad old habits that stretch all the way back in Plato—the notion that one can logically derive important conclusions about reality, via words alone. Given that Plato turned out to be just about the most anti-enlightenment philosopher of all time, an implacable enemy of democracy and science, this descent of reason should be troubling.

Indeed, the obsession of scholars, associating the Enlightenment with abstract reasoning, runs smack up against what should be considered the Enlightenment’s greatest insight -- that humans are inherently delusional beings, able to talk ourselves into anything at all. The French Idealist branch acknowledged this problem -- and replied that the answer would be found in better reasoning. A well-meaning, but inherently untrustworthy prescription. One that is, in fact, delusional in its own right.

By contrast, the pragmatic-scientific wing said: “Everybody will be deluded, as a matter of basic human nature, and we are terrible at spotting our own errors. Rationality can be just another method for incantatory justification and rationalization. But there is another answer. If we cannot spot our own mistakes, we can often notice each others! Through well-run competitive systems, like democracy, markets, and science, the give and take of reciprocal accountability can edge us ever forward toward the truth.”

Oh, sure, these competitive systems are very hard to set up and maintain. As one of the earliest leaders of the Anglo-American wing, Adam Smith, described, it is hard to arrange circumstance under which competition delivers all its benefits—creativity, innovation, vigor, accountability and error detection—without soon drawing in its own worst enemy, cheaters. As both Smith and Karl Marx pointed out, Capitalism and Democracy can turn into their own worst enemies. These pragmatic tools require endless fine-tuning, a gritty chore that often makes people tempted to turn back to simplistic dogmatism. (e.g. our present “culture war.”)

Still, the Enlightenment needed path away from the trap of essentialism, in which Rousseau and Hobbes railed at one another over flawed, overly simple descriptions of human nature. It was John Locke, founder of the Anglo-American branch, who said: Wait, you are both right and both wrong. Man is both noble and corrupt. We are complex, and we need systems that can harness that complexity, rewarding the noble traits and binding the corrupt ones. Toward this end, abstractions may inspire, they may lift our hearts... but they do not get the job done.

Hence, my conclusion to a garrulous aside. It is wrong for well-meaning scholars like Sternhell to continue calling the abstract-idealist branch of the Enlightenment its defining center. Not when most of the movement’s greatest continuing achievements were attained by the other, pragmatist/materialist branch. Not only does this ignore the Enlightenment’s greatest strengths, at a time when it is under siege by deadly foes, but this old-fashioned fixation seems obdurate, scholastic, and even rather quaint.

(Thanks Michael Rus, for spurring this thread.)


=== AND MORE SCIENCE! ===

Shades of the Crystal Spheres!

What the Ancient Greeks Can Tell Us About Democracy

And more soon......

The Harmonic Convergence of Science, Sight, & Sound

Linda MacDonald Glenn is guest blogging this month.

I had the pleasure of listening to Joann Kuchera-Morin from Allosphere at the BioPolitics/H+ conference this weekend and just had to share it -- it elevates the art and science of communication to a new dimension (including the six dimensions now recognized in quantum physics):




You can check out Linda's original blog at the Women's Bioethics Blogspot.

The 'end of science' my ass

The reports of the death of science have been greatly exaggerated.

Another effort in the 'science has come to an end' series recently appeared in the Guardian with Ehsan Masood's article, "Are We Witnessing the End of Science?" Masood's concern has more do to with how science is conducted today than a fear that the well has run dry -- though he does suggest that 'radical' advances in physics and biology are likely at an end barring some kind of technological breakthrough (e.g. Hadron Collider data).

Specifically, Masood believes that we are seeing fewer revolutions in science because of the professional way in which modern science is organized. "It takes a lot of courage to challenge conventionally accepted views," he writes, "and it needs a certain amount of stamina to constantly battle those who want to protect the status quo. Mavericks do not do well in large organisations, which is what some scientific fields have become."

While there may be some truth to Masood's assertion that there are systemic problems, the suggestion that such challenges will forever stifle potential scientific breakthroughs is overstated. These are merely short term problems. Science isn't going to stop just because of the conservatism that's supposedly embedded in the institutions that Masood is talking about.

As for the issue that scientific progress is at an end because there's nothing left to uncover, that's an equally problematic claim. This is a perspective that's been promoted by such thinkers as John Horgan, author of the book, The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age.

While I agree that the rate of paradigmatic scientific breakthroughs is slowing down, I firmly believe that there's still plenty of meaningful science to be done.

Accelerating technological change, decelerating scientific advance

A number of years ago Michael Vassar, who is now the President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and I tackled this question. We suspected that, despite the rapid pace of technological progress, that breakthroughs in science were actually slowing down. To test the theory we created a list of humanity's most important scientific breakthroughs and noted how much time had elapsed since each development:

• Advent of religion as primitive metaphysics (100,000 to 45,000 years ago)
• Meditation Pantojoli, Forest Vedas (1000 BC)
• Advent of science in Ancient Greece (350 BC)
• Arabic Mathematics (800 AD)
• Revival of Ptolemaic Astronomy (early 1500s)
• Copernican Astronomy/Heliocentrism (1543)
• Advent of Mechanistic Dynamics (17th century)
• Statistics & Probability Bayes, Pascal, Fermat, etc. (17th century)
• Calculus Huygens, Newton & Leibniz (late 17th century)
• Newtonian Dynamics (1680s)
• Newtonian Optics (1680s)
• Idea of Progress/Enlightenment (18th century)
• Thermodynamics (early 19th century)
• Biochemistry (early 19th century)
• Non-Euclidean Geometry Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Gauss, Riemann, etc. (early 19th century)
• Electro-Magnetic Induction Faraday (1821)
• Natural Selection Darwin (1858)
• Geological Uniformitarianism (mid to late 19th century)
• Mendelian Inheritance (1866)
• Maxwell's Equations (1884)
• Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements (mid to late 19th century)
• Microeconomics (mid to late 19th century)
• Germ Theory of Disease Pasteur (late 19th century)
• Advent of Speculative Science Fiction, Futurology (late 19th century)
• Unification of Chemistry and Physics (late 19th, early 20th century)
• Experimental Psychology (early 20th century)
• Undecidability (early 20th century)
• Einsteinian Relativity (1905)
• Quantum Physics (1909) Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger
• Universal Computing Turing, Gödel, Hilbert (1928)
• Advent of Cosmology (early to mid 20th century)
• Idea of force carrier Einstein, Bose, Higgs (mid 20th century)
• Standard Model of Particle Physics (mid to late 20th century)
• Neo-Darwinian synthesis with Mendelian Genetics Williams, Dawkins, etc. (mid to late 20th century)
• Chaos Theory or Complex Systems Theory (1960s)
• Memetics/Semiotics Dawkins, Eco (1970s)
• Sociobiology Wilson (1970s)

Based on this list we concluded that science had experienced a 'golden age' of sorts from the 17th through to the 19th century, and that major breakthroughs were becoming less and less frequent.

So what does that mean moving forward? As already mentioned, I suspect that the 'earth shattering' breakthroughs may be a thing of the past, though that cannot be guaranteed. Past successes may be no guarantee of future gain, but it can also be argued that the current slowdown is no guarantee that there won't be future scientific black swans.

The ongoing interplay of science and technology

The interplay between science and technological progress is a very intimate one: some of the greatest breakthroughs in science arrived alongside the introduction of new technological devices.

Take modern astronomy, for example, which was ignited by the invention of the telescope. Similarly, microbiology's emergence coincided with the introduction of the microscope. There are many other examples, including conceptual ones; it's no coincidence that the human body started to be perceived as machine-like during the industrial revolution, or that the brain started to be seen as a type of computer once information technologies took off.

It's quite possible that future advances will once again inspire the sciences. This will unlikely happen in the well-established or more traditional disciplines like astronomy, biology or chemistry. Instead, future breakthroughs will happen in the fuzzy and specialized areas that currently confound science.

The greatest beneficiary of such breakthroughs will undoubtedly be in neuroscience -- or what some observers still regard as the 'philosophy of mind' on account of its slow progress. There is still plenty of mysterious space to work in to keep scientists busy for the foreseeable future (consciousness, qualia and subjectivity in particular). And very closely related to this is the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence theory. I very much anticipate that these two fields will inform and inspire each other over the coming decades.

Another important field will be quantum computation. This is actually a potential game-changer; quantum computers would likely change the way we go about information processing and perhaps even daily life itself. If theory holds, quantum computers will eventually reach the point of instantaneous problem-solving for almost all computational problems. That's significant.

There's also the issue of converging sciences. Take molecular nanotechnology, for example, which is a collision between chemistry, physics, biology and engineering (to name a few). We will undoubtedly uncover many mysteries of both physics (at small scales) and biology as we work to create molecular scale materials and devices.

Many of the fields I just described already exist today, but they're arguably still proto-sciences that are in their first or second generation of development.

Technology is applied science

Science feeds technological development, which in turn inspires the sciences. But ultimately, all technologists are scientists. They just happen to apply their work to the real world. Without science, engineers are merely hopeful conjurers.

Which brings me to another reason that I am confident for future scientific breakthroughs: we still cannot create sufficiently accurate models of the world around us.

The human brain immediately comes to mind. If science is at an end, and we've discovered all there is to know, then why can't we create an accurate and fully functional model of the human brain? And where the heck is our modern theory of consciousness?

The list goes on. What about the science of aging? How come we haven't eradicated all diseases? Why do we still have cars that run on fossil fuels? How about addressing climate change? And what about a clean and sustainable energy source?

These are not technological problems -- they are scientific problems. And they're all tractable. Further, because there is a strong desire to solve such problems there's is a good chance that we eventually will.

And as for science coming to an end, not by a long shot. We still live in a world of mystery and doubt. Yes, science has done an admirable job answering questions to date, but there's still considerable work to be done.

Where science and Buddhism meet [video]

Where Science and Buddhism Meet from Gerald Penilla on Vimeo.

A question for my readers: Is this an accurate assessment of quantum physics and the ways in which Buddhism intersects with science?

As the U.S. moves forward, Canada risks losing its scientific edge

Fantastic news hit the wire this past Friday: the United States became the first country in the world to approve a clinical trial of embryonic stem cells in human patients. Less than one week into the Obama presidency and the country is already looking to overturn nearly a decade of regressive bioethical policies.

But what looks to be the USA's gain may turn out to be Canada's loss.

Now, I've written before about the recent parallels between Canada and the U.S. and their recent efforts to stall scientific advancement. With Obama entering the picture, however, the U.S. is looking to emerge from its Dark Age. Meanwhile, here in Canada, we continue to dawdle under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. While once a prime example of how the funding and organization of scientific research can and should be done, Canada is now drifting into a second class country in terms of its commitment to science, technology and the future. Unless Canada takes inspiration from the U.S., the negative repercussions could be disastrous and longstanding.

The problems in Canada are starting to mount and run deep. The Prime Minister, for example, has no official science adviser, nor does he plan on reinstating the position -- and this despite calls from the scientific community to implement an office of science and technology at the cabinet level.

Instead we get a patronage appointment of the Creationist Preston Manning to the toothless and stunningly useless scientific advisory board.

Obama, meanwhile, has appointed leading scientists as advisors in his inner circle, such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his secretary of energy, and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus and MIT genome biologist Eric Lander as chairs of the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

And it gets worse: half of Canada's 500 biotech firms are expected to run out of cash within the year. This grim possibility has prompted calls for the commercialization its top-notch research by offering tax and investment incentives to spur industry. Research leaders want the feds to treat science as an industry that is as vital to economic recovery as propping up the auto sector and building roads.

Even worse yet is the threatening brain drain. Canada could lose its competitive edge owing to the Obama advantage -- not to mention the ethical implications of knowingly failing to develop lifesaving and life improving biotechnologies like regenerative medicine.

Under Harper's Tories, research funding to Canadian universities has declined appreciably. The reasons for this change are undeniably ideological; the Conservative Party has expressed skepticism on the science of climate change, while their religious sensibilities have crept their way into legislation (a number of Conservative Parliamentarians are evangelical Christians, including Harper). In addition, the Conservatives' overruling of the Nuclear Safety Commission, the firing of the commission's president and their decision to abolish the office of the independent national science advisor have brought international criticism.

Canadian scientists and researchers have been keeping a close eye on the election happenings in the U.S. and the kind of science policies that Obama will put into place. Knowing that Stephen Harper is unlikely to invoke similar changes, they are biding their time and waiting for an excuse to bail on Canada.

This kind of brain drain is exactly what Canada does not need right now. We are already losing physicians to the U.S. at an alarming rate. The number of Canadians without a doctor is currently at unacceptable levels.

The Conservative government should take pause over the possibility that our best research minds are poised to leave the country. Moreover, if Canada is going to compete in the global market and provide its citizens with the best medical technologies that science has to offer, it had better rekindle its commitment to medical research.

Conceptualization beyond human capacity: mapping a 248-dimensional structure

It's been said -- somewhat infamously -- that science is all but finished. The claim is that all the great scientific breakthroughs have already been made and now it's just a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Worse, others have speculated that we puny humans, due to our limited cognitive capacities, cannot advance our science much further; we simply lack the wiring to comprehend truly advanced concepts [Brian Greene has used the analogy that you can't teach physics to a dog].

I'm not sure I buy into either assertion. There is still plenty of terra incognita for us to discover. Moreover, because our technologies are steadily advancing, we will have new tools that will help us to better see and understand our Universe.

Take supercomputers, for example. These number crunching monsters can process horrific amounts of data and reveal aspects of our world that were previously invisible to us.

Such a discovery was recently made by mathematicians who successfully mapped a 248-dimensional structure. Called a Lie group E8, it took a team of 19 mathematicians four years to develop. They produced almost 100 times more data than the Human Genome Project. There are 205,263,363,600 entries on the matrix, many of them vastly more complicated than a straightforward number; some are complex equations. If all the numbers were written out in small type, they would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

None of this would have been possible without supercomputers. The basic idea was conceived over 120 years ago by Norwegian math genius Sophus Lie -- but he didn't have a Sage supercomputer. It wasn't until now that such a process could be executed.

Why is this a big deal?

Because mathematicians have mapped out the most complex abstract structure ever conceived -- a structure that could conceivably help with work in string theory and provide a clue in the struggle for unification.

According to the standard model, all particles and forces can be represented by Lie groups. Consequently, their study has become an integral tool for understanding the laws of nature.

As computers get more and more powerful, one can reasonably assume that they will continue to act as assistive devices and help us better conceptualize and comprehend concepts, patterns and phenomenon beyond the limits of our biological minds. Many things exist which we as yet cannot see.

As Carl Sagan once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."