Science helped us anticipate eclipse
One hundred thousand years ago, you live in a small tribe preparing for the day’s hunt when suddenly a shadow crosses the sun, and all goes dark. For long terrifying minutes you ask yourselves: Is this the end? How can we survive? What will we eat? The sun returns, but the terror remains: What did we do to provoke the wrath of the gods?
The same location, 5,000 years ago, another tribe, another eclipse. But this time, an elder recalls a story she heard as a child about “a short day and a short night.” She announces that it has happened again, but that the sun will return. The tribe is humbled, and residents engage in ritual activities to welcome it back and ask that it may stay.
Fast forward another 4,000 years. This time, the community is better prepared. Its shaman, one of a long line of shamans, has warned about an eclipse, after tracking solar cycles and phases of the moon. It is now a predictable, “normal” natural phenomenon, and the shaman’s prestige is enhanced.
And now we’re in the dawn of a new millennium. The job of predicting and explaining the movements of the moon, stars, tides and the threat of pandemics has been passed on to scientists. These experts have gone from strength to strength, observing the world, developing debatable explanations for what we see, and then actually debating them, until it’s possible to choose the better explanations when they can be tested with an experiment or a predicted observation. The scientists taught us how to fly, how to share thoughts across the world instantaneously, how to feed billions of people and even how to visit the moon that blocked that sun. Notably, because of a prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity that was tested using another total eclipse a hundred years ago, the work of scientists helps us locate ourselves anywhere on Earth with GPS.
So on Monday, when an eclipse arrived, not only was it not an occasion of fear, it was an opportunity to use a full panoply of these products of science to actively pursue the experience of this exciting event. Months in advance, the internet and electronic news sources broadcast detailed maps of where to best appreciate the eclipse. We use our capacity to fly to converge from far-flung parts to these sites and then drive unfamiliar roads using GPS to navigate. (We also use scientifically developed high-tech glasses not to burn our eyes looking at the events in the sky!)
Engaging with the world using these tools of science is more than just a oneday dramatic example of high-tech entertainment. We needed this moment of play with these tools, but we also need these tools for the much higher-stakes existential, life-and-death issues of our day: pandemics, climate change and whatever else the world presents. The eclipse is an opportunity to explore our amazing 21st century capabilities and open up our sense of being empowered to tackle our world.
Why don’t we feel that sense of efficacy day-to-day? Why do we feel scared by our world’s challenges, almost as much as an eclipse scared our ancestors? Perhaps it is because we don’t see all this expertise and capability as our own — we’ve become estranged from these experts. Their methods and stories have become increasingly complicated, and we mostly encounter them on television or the internet rather than across a campfire. We know we need their methods, but we often find ourselves intimidated by baffling science and resentful of the often bossy scientists.
Healing this estrangement is possible, but only if we can see scientists as more like us and learn how to be more like scientists — not all the time but at important moments of our lives when we need to work together to find solutions to problems.
This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Even if we can’t all be professional scientists, we can all learn some of science’s most important thinking tools — selfquestioning tricks of the trade to avoid common mental traps and ways of arguing with others that help us expand our thinking and avoid fooling ourselves. If you’ve heard of “confirmation bias” you already know about one of the most common traps — cherry-picking only the evidence that puts your preferred beliefs in the most favorable light possible. You may not see yourself doing this, but you’re pretty good at seeing your uncle doing it, or your business rival or your senator. Scientists routinely learn to avoid this and other traps using methods that don’t require expensive equipment or arcane mathematics.
To make decisions and solve problems, we need facts about the world. Knowing scientists’ tricks of the trade makes it easier to work together to get things done. And it makes the world feel more predictable and less uncontrollable. But to use those facts, we also need to make judgments about values, a domain where scientists have no greater special authority than the rest of us.
In the end, we also need to have the optimism that we can tackle problems at the level of confidence that we nowadays approach an eclipse with. Conversely, we can’t approach problems with that old fear that the eclipse would engender because when we are afraid we hunker down, defend our corners and identify enemies to blame rather than recognizing critics as the necessary thought partners to solve problems.
The solar eclipse tied Americans together to enjoy the powerful enthralling spectacle, just as our primitive ancestors were tied together in fear. Being bound together in a rigid standoff of fear will get us nowhere; being bound together in a spirit of collective learning and problemsolving will get us everywhere.
Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel Laureate in physics, is a professor at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. John Campbell, a former president of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley. Robert MacCoun, recipient of the Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Psychological Science, is a professor at Stanford Law School. They are co-authors of “Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense.”