Thursday, August 20, 2009

Scientific Epiphanies

Sometime in the early 90's I was taking Physical Science 100 at BYU. I had gone back to school to pursue the degree I left to put my husband through law school and to mother six children. (I'm still technically pursuing that degree)

This is when I first heard of plate tectonics, a theory which describes the large scale motions of earth's lithosphere. When I was a child in school I was taught that even though it looked a lot like South America could fit into the side of Africa, that was completely impossible. It was just a coincidence that the coastline shapes matched.



I was so excited when I learned about plate tectonics; one day I enthusiastically told my grade school children about it. They looked at me incredulously and said, "Yeah, Mom, everybody knows that." It turned out that in the decades since I had taken a science class new things were discovered and understood about the earth's surface.

I had another such epiphany last night. Thanks to the fact that Laura and Alan don't have cable, I found myself watching a PBS special about this man:

His name is Benoit Mandelbrot. He pioneered a new mathematics called fractal geometry. A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity. Previous to Mandelbrot's theory mathematicians were all about lines and angles and numbers, and had no mathematical way to quantify curves and the patterns found in nature.

It makes sense that the patterns in nature would have some sort of mathematical nature; God is an orderly Creator. I felt close to Him as I learned about this and while the scientists were talking about natural selection, I just smiled to myself and thought that this new (to me) theory just reinforced my belief in the Creation. These beautiful patterns of fractal geometry could only be created by a loving Heavenly Father.



Perhaps I should take a science class or watch PBS more often!


*I apologize to any really smart people (my brother) who find my explanation simplistic and possibly wrong.
But I did have an epiphany nonetheless.

3 comments:

Keith Parsons said...

Janet,

It was kind of fun reading your Epiphany blog post.

Glad to see you still have some curiosity and learning left in you!

If you like that... you might try Chaos Theory (a book) that is full of items like that.

Enjoy!

jenny said...

Mom, that's neat. I love experiences like that. You are smart!

Gram said...

I think you are smart, too. I also enjoy watching PBS just to make my brain think a little. I know I cannot begin to think as well as you younger kids - Janet and Keith and Laura. However, I don't think I did too bad for not getting a college degree, which I wish I had the oomph to do now. I'm just not hungry enough for it. I do try to read and watch specials that make me think.