What Is Truth?

Across the Fence #490

“The cosmos is all that is, ever was, or ever will be.” Those words were spoken by Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, astrophysicist, and cosmologist, who co-wrote and co-produced the popular 1980 PBS series: “Cosmos: A Personal Journey.” I found the series fascinating at the time because it explored so many of the questions I had about the universe and our existence and place in it.

Now astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, and Ann Druyan, who co-wrote the 1980 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage with her late husband, Carl Sagan, have created a 13-part journey through the universe and beyond: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. It airs on ten networks, including Fox and the National Geographic Channel. The show is engaging, entertaining, and educational. I think many people are starved for intelligent, educational TV programming, instead of the many mindless reality shows that are anything but reality.

This new production brings back the Cosmic Calendar, which tries to put the unfathomable 13.8-billion-year history of the universe in the context of one year, with all of recorded history taking up just the last 14 seconds of Dec. 31. It really puts the formation and history of our world into perspective. That gets back to my question, what is truth? I know there are people who believe the universe is only 6,500-10,000 years old. There’s a lot of time difference between 6,500 and 13.8 billions years. 

If we look at scientific discoveries, we know this old sphere we’re traveling through space on has a few years on it. One example, paleontologists searching the deserts of central Ethiopia, unearthed the fossilized bones of a 4.4-million-year-old hominid creature. There’s also the 3-million-year-old “Lucy,” just to name a couple of discoveries.

If we go back in time even farther, dinosaurs disappeared from the earth about 65 million years ago. That’s a long time. We have dinosaur bones that scientifically prove they once existed and roamed the earth millions of years ago. 

The movie “Noah” has been in the news recently and has generated a bit of controversy about what animals should have been on the ark. Neil deGrasse Tyson once made a comment that dealt with a teacher’s statement about Noah’s ark: “People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.”

While watching Cosmos on Sunday night, I realized how little I really know. There’s a reason I’m not an astrophysicist. They were talking about the speed of light and how many of the stars we see in the night sky are already dead. They’ve been ghosts for millions of years. Even at the speed of light it’s taken that long for their light to reach us. That had never occurred to this meager brain I’m working with, even though I’m always questioning and looking for answers to life’s mysteries. It seems the universe is so vast that my mind can’t comprehend the enormity of it. Not only are we looking at objects that are astonishingly far away, but we’re also looking back in time. If a star is 100 light years distant, it has taken an entire century for the light to reach our eyes. For example, Alkaid, the star at the end of the Big Dipper’s handle, is about 101 light years away. If you go outside tonight and look up at the Big Dipper, the light you see from Alkaid left that star over 100 years ago. By contrast, the light from the moon is only one second old and the light from the sun occurred eight minutes before you see it.

What is truth? I keep searching for it. I know that what I viewed as truth when I was a young boy has changed as our view of the world and the universe has changed. Not that many years ago people believed that the sun revolved around the earth. We were the center of a very small universe. As scientific discoveries have been made, what we once thought was true has been proven false. The Hubble telescope has expanded our view of the universe to mind-boggling proportions. Now we know our Milky Way Galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies. Experts say there are between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies. That’s a staggering number.

Science has shown that our bodies are made up of molecules and atoms, the same as those stars and every other living thing in the world. From dust to dust, we’re all composed of “star dust.” Those are things we’ve discovered and learned in my lifetime. What is truth? What is true today may change tomorrow as new discoveries are made. I think we live in an exciting time as the universe keeps opening up and reveling new things to us. Now when I look into the vastness of the night sky, I don’t feel small and insignificant. I feel like I’m a part of it and everything and everyone is connected. 

What is truth? That’s for each of us to try and discover during our lifetime.

*