Awe and Wonder in Scientific Practice: Implications for the Relationship Between Science and Religion

This paper examines the role of awe and wonder in scientific practice. Drawing on evidence from psychological research and the writings of scientists and science communicators, I argue that awe and wonder play a crucial role in scientific discovery. They focus our attention on the natural world, encourage open-mindedness, diminish the self (particularly feelings of self-importance), help to accord value to the objects that are being studied, and provide a mode of understanding in the absence of full knowledge. I will flesh out implications of the role of awe and wonder in scientific discovery for debates on the relationship between science and religion. Abraham Heschel argued that awe and wonder are religious emotions because they reduce our feelings of self-importance, and thereby help to cultivate the proper reverent attitude towards God. Yet metaphysical naturalists such as Richard Dawkins insist that awe and wonder need not lead to any theistic commitments for scientists. The awe some scientists experience can be regarded as a form of non-theistic spirituality, which is neither a reductive naturalism nor theism. I will attempt to resolve the tension between these views by identifying some common ground

Statefinder diagnostic for cosmology with the abnormally weighting energy hypothesis

In this paper, we apply the statefinder diagnostic to the cosmology with the Abnormally Weighting Energy hypothesis (AWE cosmology), in which dark energy in the observational (ordinary matter) frame results from the violation of weak equivalence principle (WEP) by pressureless matter. It is found that there exist closed loops in the statefinder plane, which is an interesting characteristic of the evolution trajectories of statefinder parameters and can be used to distinguish AWE cosmology from the other cosmological models.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by PR

An Awesome Hypothesis for Dark Energy : The Abnormally Weighting Energy

We introduce the Abnormally Weighting Energy (AWE) hypothesis in which dark energy (DE) is presented as a consequence of the violation of the weak equivalence principle (WEP) at cosmological scales by some dark sector. Indeed, this implies a violation of the strong equivalence principle (SEP) for ordinary matter and consequent cosmic acceleration in the observable frame as well as variation of the gravitational constant. The consequent DE mechanism build upon the AWE hypothesis (i) does not require a violation of the strong energy condition $p<-\rho c^2/3$, (ii) assumes rather non-negligible direct couplings to the gravitational scalar field (iii) offers a natural convergence mechanism toward general relativity (iv) accounts fairly for supernovae data from various couplings and equations of state of the dark sector as well as density parameters very close to the ones of the concordance model $\Lambda CDM$. Finally (v), this AWE mechanism typically ends up with an Einstein-de Sitter expansion regime once the attractor is reached.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, prepared for the Proceedings of the 11th Marcel Grossmann Conference, held in Berlin, Germany, July 200

You Do Not Want to Go to the Island: A Rhetorical Panorama of The Island

The first glance at the tropical haven emerging from the luminous teal waters arouses an awe of such a paradise. The inhabitants of a facility in the Michael Bay film, The Island, daily abide in that awe, assured in their eminent continuance succeeding a lethal global contamination. Their perception, however, is limited. The inhabitants are components of a rhetorical vision and their view of the Island is less that panoramic. Through a rare analysis of film, the device of Fantasy Theme Analysis, devised by Ernest Bormann, interfaced with a notion of vampiring, an unobstructed cyclorama of the Island is made available, indeed, providentially for the inhabitants in the film as well as the real world American society

Kant on Religious Feelings - An Extrapolation

The religious feeling considered in this paper is the feeling of awe that can be construed in the extrapolation of the feeling of respect for the law. The latter itself can be better understood in analogy to the feeling of the sublime. Hence the thesis of my interpretation and extrapolation is: a characterization of the religious feeling in Kant’s critiques of reason and their analyses of feelings is possible. It has to be understood in analogy to the feeling of respect for the law and thus to the feeling of the sublime. The religious feeling would, as certain formulations suggest, refer to awe of the inconceivable size of God. The religious feeling of awe would also be a feeling caused by reason -- an instance of a judgement-based feeling. The respective judgement is a reflexive judgement, an achievement of the reflecting faculty of judgement. The religious feeling would resemble Schleiermacher’s ”plain feeling of dependence’, but given the analogy with the dialectics of the sublime, it would also include the complementary component of self-elevation

The Astro-WISE approach to quality control for astronomical data

We present a novel approach to quality control during the processing of astronomical data. Quality control in the Astro-WISE Information System is integral to all aspects of data handing and provides transparent access to quality estimators for all stages of data reduction from the raw image to the final catalog. The implementation of quality control mechanisms relies on the core features in this Astro-WISE Environment (AWE): an object-oriented framework, full data lineage, and both forward and backward chaining. Quality control information can be accessed via the command-line awe-prompt and the web-based Quality-WISE service. The quality control system is described and qualified using archive data from the 8-CCD Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument (http://www.eso.org/lasilla/instruments/wfi/) on the 2.2-m MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla and (pre-)survey data from the 32-CCD OmegaCAM instrument (http://www.astro-wise.org/~omegacam/) on the VST telescope at Paranal.Comment: Accepted for publication in topical issue of Experimental Astronomy on Astro-WISE information syste