God and the scientists
Jacob Koshy -
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:26 PM
Allahabad, land of Amitabh Bachhan, now hosts 4 Nobel laureates. They are attending a Science Conclave that has busloads of children from Kerala to Kanpur, college goers from Delhi to Osmania university and, of course, their minding, patrolling teachers. Of the laureates Sir Harold Kroto, winner of the 1996 Nobel for Chemistry, comes out tops as the crowd pleaser. From his frequent public admissions of "being a graphic artist than a chemist," (and he's done some pretty neat designs) to punctuating his presentations on fullerenes (a new class of carbon compounds he prize-winningly co-discovered) with "kaboom" "klung kling" sounds (to illustrate the breaking and forming of chemical bonds), Kroto drew full crowds to his lectures and had the audience cracking up to his witticisms.
Except when he declared his atheism.
Now, this was the sequence of events:
Kroto:(quotes Bertrand Russell) " It's been said that man is a rational animal. All my life i've been searching for evidence of this..."
Crowd: "Ha ha ha (claps).
Kroto quotes a particulary good one-liner by physicist Richard 'Funnyman' Feynman line (which i can't remember now)
Crowd: (claps louder) HA HA HA
Kroto.....I'm an atheist...
Dead (stunned?) silence. (ONE guy in the back cheers and claps and a crowd-control volunteer hisses at him to shut up)
There were other sessions. One by Laureate Martin Perl (who discovered the tau lepton, one of the fundamental particles of matter) and the students bombarded him with questions such as " How do you know God doesn't exist? What happens after death? etc etc" (Perl didn't discuss his religious inclination)
A few years ago, i obsessed about God too and have only weaker, tobacco-stained lungs for it. My question: Why do we assume that scientists think about God anymore than say, an advertising executive does?
Is it the story of Galileo forced to recant his statements about the centrality of the earth in the solar system by the Catholic Church? Or the sporadic over-reactions that atheists/scientists/agnosts have of creationism being taught in school? The ones i've asked think of themselves as mechanics--figuring out why the engine doesn't start and probably tinkering with it, rather than wonder why the engine exists. Right?