ALIEN WISDOM NOTES
words and music © Nancy Ellen Abrams 1989, 1993

When the current Archbishop of Lublin, Poland, was just a priest, he visited my home for a few days. He and my husband are both astrophysicists. Several times a day he would put down whatever he was doing and pick up the Bible. I was intrigued as to how he reconciled his religious beliefs with his science, so I asked him. This song is based on our conversation. Years later I performed it, and a physicist in the audience, Charles Misner, asked me the date of the conversation. I told him, and Misner laughed. Apparently he had suggested to Joseph a month earlier that an encompassing scientific theory does not overthrow but establishes a special level truth for the encompassed theory. But it was Joseph who saw the implications for religion. If you are interested in this question, Joel and I wrote an article for the 2001 issue of Philosophy in Science, a pretty stuffy, scholarly journal. The article is called, Scientific Revolutions in Cosmology: Overthrowing vs. Encompassing. It ends with the lyrics to Alien Wisdom. Here is an abstract of that article.

The argument of Thomas Kuhn that scientific revolutions overthrow their predecessors is only true in the early stages of a science, as illustrated by the Copernican Revolution. Once a field has established a fundamental theory, like Newtonian mechanics, that theory can be encompassed by a broader theory that reduces to (i.e. although conceptually different, makes the same predictions as) the older theory under limited circumstances. An encompassed theory then represents the highest truth possible in science within the limited arena in which its predictions agree with those of the encompassing theory. Physics is searching for the theory that will encompass relativity and quantum theory, not overthrow them. Inflationary Cold Dark Matter Cosmology, our most promising theory today to encompass the Big Bang, challenges us to reassess our human role in light of the new metaphors and visions of this highly counter-intuitive universe. The expanding universe has encompassed the Newtonian solar system. Religions might make moral progress by adopting the scientific model of "encompassing revolutions" and realizing that a larger picture of reality could respectfully encompass the wisdom of their tradition without threatening it.