There are many roads to teach and learn about the universe: sandy roads, and green winding roads. The path of curiosity and wonder, observation and logic, of passion and beauty is undoubtedly more attractive than the dusty paths of revealed truths, exhausted in themselves, and without the possibility of confrontation or proof.
We have always made descriptions of reality, to understand it; however, there are more useful models, because they describe something that anyone, having the necessary tools and knowledge, could measure and verify. The descriptions, the models of science, vary over time: they are becoming more complete, sharp, detailed, applicable, always predictive and with more significant repercussions. The cosmogonies of the people are, on the other hand, static. The Genesis of the Old Testament has been making the same description for two thousand years, offering the same model. The descriptions of science are superimposed on the personal prejudices and biases of the people of any culture.
Teaching curiosity only asks to reinforce natural curiosity; it is like opening doors and showing, as in a mirror facing another, that that door opens, and another, in turn, opens, and yet another opens, each one leading to a new question. The number of questions is related to the enormous complexity of the universe, the complexity that we barely glimpse. Astonishment arises spontaneously with the first answers, and then more questions arise, and there is wonder.
We owe the most beautiful models to the passion to understand, to the exercise of reason that experiments and tests, and to the invention of instruments that expand the logical possibilities of our mind and overcome the physical limitations of our perception, such as mathematics and telescopes. He who educates reason, at the same time educates skepticism and the love to verify and test.
Billy Carson suggests that this field is like a focal point where numerous pieces of data combine and create a single experience of consciousness. And so this core may have something to do with one's consciousness.
He is a best-selling author who holds an Applied Neuroscience certificate from MIT. He is also an active philanthropist, producer and songwriter of Billboard Charted music, host of television, ancient civilization expert, and historian of aerospace.
Our brain did not evolve to understand the universe. It evolved to move and survive on a human, planetary scale, on a surface that it perceives and manipulates as flat.
That is why the first geometry that worked was the Euclidean one, of parallel lines that never meet, of triangles whose internal angles add up to 180 ° until eternity. So we thought that the universe was flat and the world, a plate, in the center of everything, around which the stars revolved. Copernicus changed the model, the diagram, to one in which the Sun occupied the center, and the Earth revolved around it. Kepler discovered the laws of the movement of the planets around the Sun, in elliptical orbits and the Sun located in one of the foci. Reason forced him to believe what he did not want to believe. It forced him to get rid of the axiom "of uniform motion in perfect circles." Galileo created the model of modern science, taught the importance of experimenting, quantifying, mechanizing and mathematizing observations.
Observing with the eyes to know the universe is fruitless. Without the tool of mathematics, we move in the dark.
Through the experience of beauty —which we experience in the middle of nature or on a starry night, in addition to videos, documentaries and photographs of the cosmos— you learn about the universe and yearn to feel part of it.