We are living by faith every day.
Disclaimer: Any resemblance of the blog today to real science is probably accidental. I am intentionally avoiding technical language. The words here are my own. I don’t think any professionally produced book would include any of this. This is just you and I sharing our thoughts as if we were waiting for a bus.
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August 8, 2007 (Wednesday) – Computers rule. Everywhere you go, you encounter the ubiquitous computer. Your new car won’t run without one. Your little handheld calculator is one. Your digital watch, too. When you handed your hard-earned cash over to the teller at the bank, it was transformed from green currency to invisible electronic pulses. In multiple computers.
The world has become dependent on computers, but fascinating to me is the fact that, stripped down to its essentials, the computer is nothing more than tiny electronic switches, turning an extremely small electric current on and off at an incredible rate of speed. It is kin to your light switch, which has two settings, “on” or “off,” but it has no moving parts. That’s it. The switches are really transistors, but they have been miniaturized so that thousands of them fit into a tiny chip called an “integrated circuit,” or “IC.” The circuits thus built work together with others, all of them cooperating to produce some kind of end result. The result may be a display on a monitor that sits on your desk, it may be the amount of oxygen it senses in your automobile engine’s fuel mixture, or any one of thousands of actions, depending upon the purpose and type of the computer.
The tiny electric current inside the computer keeps things going in today’s world. It makes your phone work, takes your picture, turns the traffic signals on and off, and performs thousands of other functions woven so successfully into the fabric of your daily activities that you may have become unaware of them. Think about it. These little bits of electric power are invisible to our eyes, yet they form the basis of what makes most stuff work today.
Our inventions are not created out of nothing. They are the results of discovering how things already work in the physical world. We have only harnessed the natural world with our electronics. The truth is — and I find this almost impossible to comprehend — the truth is that everything you see and touch is made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are tiny collections of electrons and such, which are held together by even smaller particles. So, the chair in which you sit, when analyzed, is an arrangement of bits of energy you can’t really see. Yet you see the chair, and you sit in it. How is that possible? Here the “lesson” ends. Someone more versed in the physical laws that hold the universe together will have to explain it further.
When something so basic as a chair, or a rock, or a handful of dust becomes a mysterious collection of invisible stuff when analyzed, how can we be so dogmatic about what we know? You might say, we live by faith — faith that the laws of physics will be as true and dependable tomorrow as they were today. Since we are living by faith anyway, in an incredible universe that abides by physical laws that keep us from living in pure chaos, why not believe in the One who designed it and made it so?
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Read Dale Pogue’s blog: “The Muse is Loose”