And in case you are interested, here’s my interview on AT with Neil deGrasse Tyson, along with some footnotes.
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Bill O’Reilly should be quite happy to just continue living in the trees.
Small correction: according to Wikipedia, we’ve known what causes the tides since about 325 BC – much longer than a couple of hundred years.
While we’ve long had a stock response to the ‘god of the gaps’ argument, this is perhaps the most eloquent non-threatening version of it I’ve encountered.
Sheila, we had a good idea back then but the first proper mathematical model that took into account the actual physics was probably Lapalace’s “tidal equations” which date to the last quarter of the 18th century, but even that wasn’t complete. A fully modern true harmonic model of tides comes from the early 20th century.
So, in truth, there are probably numerous answers to that question and Neil was addressing the question: could we “fully explain the tides” … which I would probably put at Laplace (230 years or so) or the harmonic theory (90 years or so).
“god is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance…”
–Neil DeGrasse Tyson
i like that!
I want to have Neil deGrasse Tyson’s babies. He friggin ROCKS.
A better example is one that Dr. Tyson has used in the past, namely the issue of the stability of the Solar System. Issac Newton, when he was unable to account for the effects of the interplanetary interactions between the other known planets at the time on the stability of the Solar System, invoked god as intervening every so often to maintain the stability. Laplace some 100+ years later used perturbation theory to compute the interplanetary interactions and showed that, indeed, the Solar System was stable over long periods of time. He gave a copy of his treatise on the subject to Napoleon who, after browsing through it asked Laplace as to what part god might play. Laplace famously responded: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQucyuKsrOE&feature=related
My wife wants to have his babies too. Neil is clear, motivating and non-confrontational. Perfect counterpoint to BillO’s knee jerk stupidity.
I’m still not convinced O’reilly was arguing from ignorance when he said that. It always sounded to me like he was using the tides and the sunrise as a metaphor for the miracle of the world not spontaneously ending while he sleeps. It’s still a crappy argument, particularly given the inherent ethnocentrism. But I’ve never been particularly impressed by how the skeptic community handled this.
O’Reilly put god in a box, Neil Degrasse Tyson made the convincing argument the the box keeps getting smaller.
I think almost every argument for the existence of God boils down to the God of the Gaps. There are exceptions such as the argument from morals which was blown out of the water by Plato, and other exceptions which are easily dismissed as sophistry; But everything else is God of the Gaps.
This is part of why atheists are accused of being arrogant. The theist thinks that no one could be an atheist without having all the gaps filled. The gaps are obviously not all filled, therefore the atheist holds to arrogant delusions that they are filled. It does not occur to the theist that atheists are simply comfortable with unfilled gaps.
This has been going around but for those who missed the out-of-character Colbert interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson you need to watch this. Serious, serious squee.
How would you have handled it? Impress me.
Thanks for your interest in that clip of me referencing Bill O’Reilly. It’s part of a much longer interview, of course, if anybody is interested. [60 min]: http://bit.ly/flh05c
An note to Sheila. If I were that far off in time-frame then your note would hardly count as a “small correction”. Consider that tides are caused by both the gravity of the Sun and the Moon. So we could not have understood the tides until we understood gravity itself, And that did not take place until Issac Newton advanced the universal law of gravitation in 1687, in his seminal treatise “Principia”. Yet even the great Newton, in his attempt to understand the tides, got it wrong.
What complicates matters is that it’s not the gravity of the Sun and the Moon but the **difference** in gravity across Earth’s physical body that causes the tides. Not only that, the tides on Earth, in spite of how they are drawn in textbooks, do not line up with the Moon and Sun, but sit ahead of them on Earth’s surface. Small advances in detail were made over the years since Newton, but not until G.H. Darwin’s (second son of Charles Darwin) work “The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System” (1901) did a complete solution of what causes the tides get solved.
So when I said a “couple hundred years” i could have justifiably said only “a century,”, but I was planting the time frame halfway between George H. Darwin and Isaac Newton, out of respect for those who came in between.
Note that for someone to assert “the Moon causes the tides” (as all observant ancient civilizations knew) but not be able to explain why, does not constitute an actual understanding of the phenomenon.
Again, thanks for your interest in my comments.
-NDTyson
Neil, thanks for the comment. I’ve added a link to the full interview, as well as to our interview a while back.
This is actually something that could be drawn out as a lesson in the history of science and idea. Between your comment and my comment, we’ve quickly identified a number of points at which one could say we “understood” or could “explain” tides. Going from something like “It’s the Sea Gods Rolling Around in the Great Bathtub” to “The moon causes them” would be a major advancement, yet as you point out, not an understanding. Of course, the fact that we now have a gravitational model that incorporates both the sun and the moon (and understand the importance of tidal forces in planetary dynamics elsewhere) is great, but perhaps people in the future will look back through the lens of Wikipedia and note that we had not yet identified the graviton, so we didn’t fully get it.
The most salient features of the tides are probably:
Periodicity at the first order (up and down almost twice a day); Spring/neap tides (longer term periodicity) and different amplitudes in different areas of the coast and other details of what happens with the tides near shore. (Compare the tides in Miami, FL with the tides in Eastport ME for a dramatic example.)
Knowing the influence of both the moon and the sun, understanding the math and physics of the harmonics, and also how physical geography affects water moving around in ocean basins are all needed to BOTH predict the tides as they are and understand them well enough to explain and in turn (in theory) predict what tides would look like anywhere they might exist.
The average person is probably willing to understand that “the moon did it” but that is perhaps closer to “the sea gods are rolling around” than to the fully scientific modern explanation. But, if the average person simply wants to know why the tides vary across the month and why they are different in different places, and what’s all this about tidal forces on the small moons circling giant planets, then a certain amount of science/math literacy is probably needed.
It is a little like having to know something about spectra and spectroscopy to really enjoy so many things in the cosmos.
Robert Burns: “O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.”