There Are Four Lights

In 2009, I sent this little tweet, which enjoyed many RTs (including one from @BadAstronomer).

The next year, I decided to transform the idea into manga form. Again, it was blogged by the lovely Bad Astronomer. The drawing has appeared in a few of my talks as well.

This year, I was thrilled to find out that my creation jumped from cyberspace to meatspace! The Chicago Skeptics celebrated Carl Sagan Day by eating apple pie and drinking Cosmos! Amazing! I’m glad they joined the fine Mayhew tradition!

Tomorrow, November 6th, is Carl Sagan Day! Whether or not you participate in the organized events or the above activities, you can share in the celebration with this special piece I sketched up just in time for the 2nd annual all-day celebration of the famous astronomy, skeptic, and science educator. Send it to your friends!

And now that you know the artist’s beverage of choice you can help her celebrate and buy her a drink:

Downloads:

| wallpaper 1600×1200 | wallpaper 1920×1200 | iPad |

Update: Nov.6th is when the 2nd Annual Carl Sagan Day event takes place. Nov. 9th is Carl Sagan’s birthday. There are several events taking place throughout the month, but “Carl Sagan Day” is taking place, this year on Saturday the 6th.

For those of you who may not be familiar with anime or manga this rendition of four of the greatest scientists in our history might seem a little odd. For anime/manga fans reading this who aren’t familiar with ‘Charlie, Carl, Albert and Isaac’, this is probably confusing to you as well!

Since we’re celebrating Carl Sagan Day, I thought I’d create a little piece of artwork that has been floating around in my head for a while—-what Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Newton might look like if they were bishounen characters in a manga series.

This had already been posted on PZ Myers‘ mega-traffic blog, Pharyngula, but I wanted to post it here too, since it is so awesomely nerdtastic!

Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

I have some super geeky fan devotion of my own to post; Darwin, Einstein, Sagan, and Newton…all drawn in manga ‘bishounen’ style! No, I’m not kidding—-I have Charlie and Albert sketched already and am inspired to finish & colour all four, after having seen this awesome display of nerdom!

I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.

-Carl Sagan

Hmm, hopefully I’ve mentioned here before that something I want to accomplish in my work is to create characters who are good role models as scientists and critical thinkers and to promote the use of reality-based reasoning and good skepticism. The movie “Knowing”, with Nicolas Cage, accomplishes the complete opposite. Scientists are drunken, miserable, lonely cranks that need to learn how to be happy from those who have blind faith in magic sky people.

The director, Alex Proyas, was quoted saying he wanted the movie to explore different viewpoints, “the scientific viewpoint of the logical construct of the universe and the one of faith, where people see this incredibly complex place we live in and go, ‘Well, how could this have all just happened randomly?’“ (my bold) This is one major annoyance with the film; it doesn’t even know what science is and what viewpoint it has. Again, audiences are getting the misguided message that science claims everything is random and stuff just happens by accident.

The irony is, unlike new age garbage like numerology, scientific theories actually do make accurate predictions for the world around us. Real predictions…not just after-the-fact pattern matching that happens with divination games like astrology, tarot, and psychic readings. You can use scientific theories to accurately launch a small rover into space and have it travel to another freakin’ planet and predict where it should land on that planet, hundreds of millions of kilometers away! Or you can have a theory like evolution, which predicted, about a hundred years before the discovery of genetics, that such a system should exist–it predicted the existence of an entirely new field of science!

Science is all about discovering how the world works and the cause behind the things we see and experience. It is faith that gives empty answers for why the world is the way it is; it’s faith that tells us that the big questions about the universe are infinitely mysterious and beyond our grasp.

And, frankly, it’s a little tiring to see the happy religious characters lecturing to grumpy miserable scientist characters in films and TV. The happiest people I know are scientifically minded and lead their lives free of faith and the supernatural. All the religious and new age people I know are quite unhappy, worry-full people, who always seem to be lost and unsure. Anecdotal, I know…

It’s not hard to see why such a horrible movie is doing so well at the box office. A lot of people are full of doubt, fear, and uncertainty about the future. It’s a comforting idea that there’s a magic solution that can warn us of danger and protect us against the unknown…and the only thing you have to do is keep believing, no matter what the facts tell you.

Just keep listening to the little voices inside your head–they know a lot more than the objective voice of reason coming from your MIT colleague.

Cage, you and your pseudoscience crapfest are forcing me to quote again:

For me, it is far better to understand the universe as it really is, than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring.

-Carl Sagan

If you’ve read any of this blog, you’ve probably guessed I’m an atheist–that gross word people use to describe us non-believers. But I think I’ve said before that atheism isn’t what’s important to me; I’m more concerned about skepticism in general (rather than just being skeptical about gods)…because atheism alone can lead to those annoying people who say “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”. I know because I used to be one of those annoying people…

And spirituality still involves faith: believing something to be true without evidence, despite evidence to the contrary, or even believing something for which there can be no evidence. There seems to be only one reason why we would give in to this type of thinking; because it feels good. People only have faith in things they want to be true. And so, when you use faith you fall into a dangerous mode of thought where you let your emotions get in the way of seeing objective truth.

This is where I found what’s important to me (and why I love Carl Sagan so much)…I realized that I’m far more concerned about what’s true than what feels good. This takes much more discipline than faith, though the spiritual gurus would have you think different. Spirituality is constantly trying to convince people that faith is a virtue and that it takes a disciplined mind to make faith work.

I have never known anyone, not one person, either religious or spiritual who is happy…truly content, and content because of their faith. What I see is people constantly needing to remind themselves of their faith; day in and day out they need to repeat to themselves what they believe…as if they are deeply unsure if it really is true. They need to gather in large groups with others of similar faith to reassure one another that this is what they all believe. Not only do I find this deeply unsatisfying, but doesn’t that also seem like a ritual of self-denial?

This is why I want truth. Truth isn’t something you need to recite. The truth simply is…whether you want it to be or not…good or bad. The truth about the world around you is there whether you choose to accept it or not, whether it hurts you or not, whether you want it or you don’t. Truth doesn’t promise to always makes you happy–but isn’t there something so very selfish about wanting only what makes you happy to be real? What the truth will always offer you is understanding and that is something that stays with you.

Heeey~! Let’s write a post about things in my room I like! Okee! Hmm, what do we have? Yes, that green cat is Cringer from MotU (I no longer have his Battle Cat armor). Apparently, he’s guarding a few copies of Shojo Beat; I haven’t had a subscription this year because I never got around to reading them very often. Though, I do like scanning through them when I get stuck drawing and need some shoujo inspiration.

At the top of one of my little book piles is Hamlet. If I’m not mistaken, this copy is from my highschool days and somehow was never returned. I really like the binding–oh, and I like Hamlet…though I think I enjoy MacBeth more (Cyrano was my favourite). There’s some manga at the bottom of the pile; I don’t think I’ve read any of them. I like the artwork in Kamikaze but have no clue what the story is about. I have read some of the Fushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden, but not lately. Wedged inbetween Kamikaze and my random copies of Secrets of Sorcerers is a Harry Potter book. I’ve actually only read the last two HP books (and by read I mean listen to Jim Dale read it to me). Now, here’s the really good stuff; my Carl Sagan books! Cosmos, Broca’s Brain, and The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

This book is definitely one of my favourites. It’s edited by Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, and contains his talks from the Gifford Lectures. The subtitle is “A Personal View of the Search for God”, but there’s plenty more here than just religious debate. I think Sagan explains nicely why science clashes with religious and spiritual beliefs so often, in a way that is really clear for those, like me, who have no background in science. I’m reading and listening to a few of Sagan’s books so I tend to mix up what I’ve read from which book, but what I love about Sagan is how he can explain science topics simply while still sounding ‘magical’. I think that’s what some people find missing when listening to many scientists talk; it can seem dry or cold…like there’s no emotion involved in their work. Sagan talks about nature in the same sort of poetic way that new age gurus try too. If you’ve ever heard someone say, in response to science, that they just want to believe that “there has to be more than this“, as though they just aren’t sastisfied with the ‘plain facts’ and just want that magical feeling about the universe, then you should point them towards this book; Sagan makes the universe seem just as, if not more magical than any spiritual guru could, but he just so happens to have evidence for the claims he’s so passionate about.

Now, we can’t forget about my Sky-Watcher telescope! Sadly, I haven’t used it in awhile and probably would if it wasn’t stuck in my room. The nice thing about living in a small town is there isn’t a lot of light polution, so I can just take it out onto the back deck for stargazing. And it doesn’t take very long to drive out of town away from the street lights.

Man, I really dig Jupiter and Saturn! Jupiter was the first planet I saw when I first bought my scope. I was all “wthasdkfjwoeihosif~that big bright star turns into a PLANET in this thing homg! Magic!“. It has tiny lil specs orbiting it, awwww…so cute! And yes, Saturn and its rings still amaze me each and every time I see it.

I don’t have a manga doodle to go along with this entry (I’m working on Legend of the Ztarr). I just wanted to post about the Beyond Belief conferences, after recently finding out that the 3rd conference, BB3: Candles in the Dark, took place earlier this month. The videos were available online through The Science Network’s website, but apparently had to be taken down do to overwhelming demand and will be available through Google video sometime soon. Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark, has a wonderful Carl Sagan quote on the about page:

In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

(My bold)

One of my favourite talks is from the 2006 conference, in the second session, which is by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I couldn’t get enough of the first conferences so finding out about the third is really making me geekout. These kinds of lectures make me giddy as a schoolgirl.

Tyson’s talk is basically about the “god of the gaps” argument. I’ve come to realize that even atheists aren’t immune to this type of thinking, despite their lack of belief in a deity. Atheists can still believe in astrology, homeopathy, psychics, dowsing, acupuncture, or any other paranormal/pseudo-science faith based systems, without ever invoking a god to fill in the gaps. Instead, they can throw around words like “energies”, “vibrations”, or fill in what they don’t know with quantum magic words “entanglement”, “fields”, or my favourite gap-filler, “uncertainty principle”. You can be an atheist and still not be a critical thinker, still not be a skeptic. The atheist equivalent to the ‘god of the gaps’ that I’ve come across most often is to say that there are just some things that are out of the realm of science. I think Tyson’s talk illustrates very well that it’s this kind of thinking that hinders discovery.

No, I can’t prove that you won’t spontaneously turn into a toaster. But, in the case of some people, I can certainly wish you will. I’m often disappointed when I mingle within the art world and speak with fellow artists about anything other than art, specifically, science. All that tends to be said is a bunch of wishy-washy gobbly-goop. As a mangaka, I love telling stories, especially the kind of stories that involve magic, spirits, and strange sci-fi phenomena. However, that’s where it ends, for me. I don’t pretend to believe that any of the mysticism, either in my own work or in other books, manga, movies I love, can translate literally into the world we live in. There’s no reason to believe in the existence of spirits, ghosts, demons, deities…or…um, horcruxes. People don’t have psychic powers, they can’t perform divination, and no one can come back in blue-Jedi form (unfortunately). All that fun stuff can only happen within the imaginary made-up worlds in storytelling. But, when confronted with claims saying otherwise, what is a little, non-sciencey, mangaka to do? Eh? Whatcha gonna do, Ms. Grumpy-pants aka closed minded, cold, heartless, evidence-whore?!

The first problem to address is the misunderstanding over what science is. Like  Michael Shermer says, science is a verb. Science isn’t old men in white lab coats; its critical thinking. If there’s one anti-science argument I hear over and over again it’s that science is biased. Well, gosh darn it, this breaks my little grumpy-pants heart! I think the mistake being made here is the difference between a scientist being biased and science being biased. “Of course, you’re gonna say my homeopathic quantum juice doesn’t work, Mr. Fancypants…you’re a ‘scientist’!” (And we all know that negative energy vibrations from Fancypants scientists interfere with how woo-juice works).

Scientists can be prone to bias, like anyone else, but the scientific method itself is objective. There’s no better methodology one can use to fight against our own personal beliefs, observer bias, and confirmation bias. In the world of art and storytelling, things are based on interpretation and your work is perceived differently by different people because of their own experiences, cultural beliefs, and personal tastes. Two people can look at the same piece of art and hold two completely different and valid opinions about it. So, it makes sense that someone used to functioning in the art world might apply this type of thinking to science as well. However, science is not relative. One of the purposes of the scientific method is to produce results which can be repeated by anyone, anywhere, no matter what their biases may be. Again, I’m just a mangaka, but if I understand correctly, even with Einstein’s relativity-where observers can hold different but equally valid claims based on their frame of reference-the theory itself is not relative.

Perhaps, it would be better if I used the words critical thinking or rational thought instead of ‘science’. I doubt as many people would argue against being rational and I can’t think of many scenarios where one would stop and say “You know, I don’t think this is a claim that you should apply science critical thinking to”. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being exposed to skepticism that I find most valuable is the ability to realize when I’m believing something simply because I want it to be true. Ann Druyan writes, in the introduction to Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience:

“…science opens the way to levels of consciousness that are otherwise inaccessible to us; that, contrary to our cultural bias, the only gratification that science denies to us is deception.“