If you follow the stories that appear in the media you will know that a very large piece of scientific equipment was turned on at 4.00 pm on Wednesday 10 September (Perth time), the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) the particle accelerator built by CERN. It was actually turned on in Switzerland where the 27 km circular tunnel is buried in the ground stretching across France and Switzerland. Inside this tunnel is a super cold vacuum for protons to travel around at almost the speed of light. It has taken almost 20 yrs to design and build, thousands of people have worked on this project, many countries have supported it and billions of dollars have been spent.
Why?
The main reason why is because human beings don’t know very much about the matter and structure of the universe, and we would like to find out more.
There is no specific outcome for this scientific experiment in terms of making money or products , rather it is for the pursuit of knowledge. No doubt there will be spin-offs that will lead to improvements in technology that may filter down to impact on the lives of some people ( after all this is how the internet developed) but that is not the major motivation for doing this sort of scientific research.
How many times whilst studying for your degree do you wonder:
why am I reading this text?
why do I have to find out about this theory?
Why do I have to critically analyse this concept in a 2000 word essay?
how will this help me in my future career?
When such questions arise perhaps you might consider the perspective of the scientists involved in the LHC, and remember that none of us knows what we will find when we wonder, explore, imagine, muse, analyse , evaluate and consider the big questions of life like: what is the nature of the universe? or how should I live my life ethically?
Sometimes the application of knowledge and of our thinking lies far away in the future or in the land of ‘never never’.
There can be a clash between the way that students think about university and the expectations they have and the expectations and assumptions that academics have of students.
The gap between these expectations may be explainable in terms of age/culture/technology. Or it might be that there have always been some differences between academics and students.
You may have already seen this Youtube where students take themselves as the subject of a survey, but watch it again anyway and consider: what sign you would want to hold up?
What is the statement that you may want to make about the experience of studying at university in the twenty-first century?
I have posed this question because my students have made me think ( yet again) about some of the difficult issues of epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the theory of knowledge. To know something I have to know how I know it, and how I can justify my statement as knowledge , rather than hearsay or a fairy tale as the word knowledge does carry with it an implication of some sort of ‘truth claim’.
Most of the time when I think about something I prefer to think about it in a truthful manner , built around information, facts etc so that I have a sense that I am thinking and building some form of truthful knowledge. (There is I know a great debate about claims to truth and veracity but I will put that on hold for now.) Now one of the ways that I can gather these facts, sift through this information and find out more about the world and other people is to talk to lots of people from many different backgrounds and listen to their stories.
One of the opportunities at Murdoch University in a tutorial discussion is for students to find out about each other and the many different cultures that they all come from, yet I have noticed that students tend to end up in groups of ‘like to like’. People who have similar dress styles, similar ages, similar genders, similar cultures etc will tend to sit together. What a loss of opportunity and epistemological pleasures that is!
If, as a general rule in our lives we mainly spend time with and seek others out whose external appearance reflects our own, whose sense of identity is similar to our own, we are limiting our capacity to know and to understand other people and the world generally. and thus my identity can become a trap of solipsism. A trap in which all I will ever know is myself and those who are like me.
One of the questions that human beings have grappled with through the philosophical ages is : ‘What does it mean to be human?’ Human beings used to be defined as the ‘tool making’ animal and then Jane Goodall
watched chimpanzees in the Gombe forest of Africa create a tool with which to gather food. No longer could we use this capacity to define ourselves as distinct and different from other animals.
Perhaps , it is language that makes human being unique amongst animals? but wait, other animals also have complex forms of communication, such as the songs of the humpback whale.song.htm Perhaps, it is that we organise large scale events that makes us humans more than just animals. Events of the size and scale of the Olympic games which costs the host country huge amounts,(report from the BBC)
Plus, participating countries such as Australia spend vast amounts of money and then huge numbers of our young people dedicate years of their life to relentless training and discipline for two weeks every 4 years to compete for glory and status and kudos. But again chimpanzes also spend large amounts of time and energy over establishing status and hierarchy.
Is our focus on: who has the most gold medals? who is the fastest man on earth? just a version of who is the chimp with the biggest… ???
Perhaps, what we can do as human beings is reflect and think critically about why we, as a world civilisation, spend so much of our time, money and effort on swimming faster, jumping higher , kicking a ball more accurately or throwing a ball further, than someone else?? What is that all about? Why do we think it matters?
If you have been caught up in the emotional turmoil of watching “our” athletes, why does it catch your attention? Would you feel the same way if you could watch on TV each week the wonderful heartwarming efforts of aid workers struggling to assist impoverished peoples? Why ? Why not?
How can you critically and creatively reflect on what this olympic event is? For perhaps what we need to focus on is not what distinguishes us from other animals but how much we are like all animals and therefore how much we must try to imagine, reflect on, empathise with others in order to create something different to our current conditions.
