Book Binding is Spellbinding
A 15-billion Mile Hack, Jordan Peterson, Book Binding, &tc.
Dear Friends,
For today’s Quarter Inch let’s talk a little bit about science!
For 46 years the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been hurtling into outer space. After successfully finishing its original mission taking a fruitful and closer look at outer planets she just kept right on going. A decade or so ago she truly entered into the unknown: interstellar space. That means the probe completely left the influence of the Sun’s gravity and exited the solar system. Despite the confident claims of astrophysicists, we don’t really know what interstellar space is. We have models and theories and very educated guesses, but Voyager plowed right on into it at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour and kept on relaying information back to Earth.
And then she went silent. Or at least started sending gibberish messages.
If that story is not incredible enough for you, as it should be, let’s do one better. The brilliant folks at the Jet Propulsion Lab then woke her up. Or smacked her upside the head. That’s right. From a distance of fifteen billion miles—that’s with a “B”—they managed to fix a problem involving broken hardware. Now, this problem involves computer chips and hardware that make an old Commodore 64 look like ChatGPT. Nevertheless, they coded a “fix” that would move corrupted data from one broken chip to another location. They sent it out via radio signal, which took over 22 hours to reach Voyager. Then Voyager sent a message back, while the patient software engineers twiddled their thumbs awaiting it for another 22 hours.
The fix worked and Voyager 1 is back in business. Truly amazing. I do think it is amusing that these stories never report whether she is telling us anything useful (I imagine not, traveling in empty space so vast it will take her 40,000 years to just get near another star), but it is still an incredible scientific achievement.
You might wonder: how is Voyager 1 still awake? She is so far from the Sun that her solar panels are useless. Answer: electricity generation from decaying plutonium. Nuclear power. Wonders never cease.
Keeping with the scientific theme, I ran across this video clip of Jordan Peterson talking about the religious character of the scientific enterprise. (Yes, I continue to be irritated beyond belief that Elon Musk at “X” refuses to let posts from that site to be embedded on Substack. You’ll have to click that link to see the video.)
What Peterson says in the clip is something that should be shouted from the rooftops. Many of us have been metaphorically shouting it for years. Science is a religious enterprise. It assumes—must assume—metaphysical axioms that are not themselves subject to the scientific method. Peterson is so articulate on the subject it almost sounds like he’s been reading Vern Poythress’s Redeeming Science.
The thing I don’t understand is why Jordan Peterson himself does not seem to believe that these necessary metaphysical presuppositions themselves are real or true. As a Jungian psychologist, he seems to think that they are some kind of archetypal “meme” universally endemic to human consciousness, but whether God objectively exists is neither here nor there. The “axioms” are useful and necessary, in other words, but not necessarily true. So his final admonition about valuing truth above all things sounds really strange flowing from his as-yet unbelieving brain. It is so weird seeing a man basically become a Christian evangelist while not being a Christian. One hopes and prays he resolves that dissonance, and soon. He should follow the lead of his wife and daughter, both recently baptized.
Let’s talk about a more primitive science. It isn’t primitive because the technology is simple, but rather because it is old.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Square Inch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.