The latest in the Friday Inspiration series features the Symphony of Science

“We Are All Connected” was made from sampling Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The History Channel’s Universe series, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

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Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of everyday life we can lose a sense of perspective. It is easy to get bound up in our own little universe and become filled with self-importance. Religion helps some of us remember our place in the scheme of things. But, as the poetic insights of Carl Sagan show, science helps define our true place in the universe. The scientific view teaches us to love the only home we’ve ever known and the fellow passengers on our ‘pale blue dot’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8Ol3h-Dmu8

Our home, the pale blue dot.

Carl Sagan, who we met before in The Baloney Detection Kit, speaking about our ‘pale blue dot’ in 1996:

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_naQhynOg0

Hat tip to @pzmyers (Pharyngula) for JHLUKHRT‘s recording.

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Not sure what to believe?

Start using your Baloney Detection Kit.

The idea of a ‘Baloney Detection Kit‘ originates with the late Carl Sagan, as detailed in his classic book ‘The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark‘, and is really about applying the scientific approach to assessing claims about anything. It applies to everything we do in our daily lives, and especially in medicine where so much baloney is thrown around – whether its by the likes of Big Pharma or practitioners of Woo.

Here Michael Shermer describes his version of the ‘Baloney Detection Kit’. Keep one one you at all times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUB4j0n2UDU

Michael Shermer’s 10 question BDK:

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

Finally, in case you don’t feel geeked out enough, here’s ‘We Are All Connected’ from the Symphony of Science (hat tip to @MovinMeat – yet again). It’s a fitting tribute to the likes of Sagan and Richard Feynman, two men who truly saw the beauty of reality and shared it with us all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

“Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”

- Carl Sagan

Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency Medicine education blog