Science and Me

I like to consider myself an intelligent woman. I believe that I am well-educated and have a reasonable ability to comprehend difficult concepts. I act as if I understand the various scientific reasons the world works as it does. The truth is that when I look on these myriad processes I truly see one thing. Magic. That is the actual depth of my understanding. Nuclear reactors. Magic. Electricity. Magic. Digestion. Magic. I am no more aware of how these things work that I am of next week’s lottery numbers; I know that they will contain digits which are a combination of 0-9.

A good example of my belief in magic can be characterized by my relationship with electricity. I sit here with my headphones on; listening to music while I write this with no clear idea of what makes this possible. I can speak with great confidence about power plants and generators but, it’s all a front. I do not know what actually happens when I plug my little MP3 player into my computer to “charge” its battery. I take it on faith that after a given period of time the little meter shaped liked a battery will be full and that when I flip the “on” switch it will play music. Magic. And don’t even get me started on how sound can be digitized, recorded, etc. As far as I’m concerned, my MP3 player is a magic box that has forty-eight bands and a symphony orchestra shrunk down to microscopic size contained within it. Or do I mean nanoscopic? I am sure that at some point in my life I was presented with a cogent explanation of how electricity works – probably while watching School House Rock. Nevertheless, all the details about electrons and conductors have been smelted down by my furnace of a brain into one big lump of magic.

            If I were to try and explain to a child how the body turns food into energy and more person parts, the results would be laughable at best. I would probably start strong enough by describing how stomach acids break down the food we eat but I cannot in anyway explain how the body then goes about extracting anything from the resulting soup – let alone transferring it to my cells and toe nails. To me, the only way that a slice of veggie deluxe pizza becomes brand new cells for my friend, Liver, is unmitigated magic. I know about as much about the process as I know about how that damn rabbit ended up in Mystical Marvin’s top hat.

            And now, on to the Magical World of Computers! I remember my class in junior high where it took the full hour to type commands into the system to make an outline of a sailboat that I could have drawn in twenty seconds with a crayon. But, in a way, that made sense to me. I had to tell the system where to place each individual pixel on the screen to form the pathetic sailboat. I could assume that all the operating systems we use daily that I find so convenient are a result of someone writing lots and lots of sailboat type commands. My mind boggles at the very idea. What makes it possible for me to use a program to draw my same sailboat via pointing and clicking is, clearly, magic. We can now store vast amounts of information on microchips that look like the base materials for really exciting, avant-garde art jewelry. It’s not binary, my friends. It’s magic. The internet? Wi-Fi? Cloud drives? Magic flowing through wires and flying through the air. I have friends who could sit down with me and patiently explain every detail of how our new information age functions in ways both educational and entertaining. But, after the magic show was over I would still be wondering how he crammed all those doves up his sleeve.

            I have to reach a place where I accept and embrace how I really see the world. The magical sun rises every morning and sends down its magical rays to warm the earth and magically feed the plants. Plants which are magically turned into parts of animals which we magically turn into parts of humans (unless you’re a vegetarian which means you skip the magic animal step). The humans then perform tremendous feats of magic as they magically stick to the surface of the earth. I, magically, give up.