Denial is a common defense mechanism used to shield oneself from a painful truth.\u00a0 If you are an alcoholic, and making your family miserable, you will deny that it\u2019s drinking that\u2019s the problem.\u00a0 If you hurt your 3-year-old child, that child, whose life depends on her parents, can\u2019t afford to know that someone they have to depend on is hurting them, so they make it be that \u201cit wasn\u2019t so bad\u201d and often \u201cI deserved it.\u201d If you are a wife whose husband is having an affair, you won\u2019t see what is obvious to everyone around you, and if a good friend tries to warn you, you won\u2019t listen.
\nI remember the first time I was faced with having to give up a comfortable old truth for a new one.\u00a0 Since it was in the realm of science it was easy to accept.\u00a0 When I was a child, I learned that the solar system came about because another star had passed close to our sun and pulled out a long swath of material which then became the planets.\u00a0 In my first astronomy course at college, I was told that as the sun condensed out of the original cloud of matter, a disk formed, somewhat like the rings of Saturn.\u00a0 From this disk came the material for the planets.\u00a0 I remember my resistance to this idea, but as a scientist I could see that the new theory was much better, and found my reluctance an interesting phenomenon.
\nAt that time I was still in denial of my parents\u2019 alcoholism.\u00a0 After I had graduated from college I lived at home for a year.\u00a0 One day an old school friend came by for lunch.\u00a0 My mother drifted into the room and wafted out again.\u00a0 As soon as she was out of the room, Susan looked at me and said \u201cHow long has your mother had a drinking problem?\u201d BLAM!\u00a0 The lights went on.\u00a0 I had known something was wrong, but had never been able to name it.<\/p>\n
All my life I\u2019ve been committed to the truth.\u00a0 I was very fortunate to go to Wellesley College and major in astronomy which was taught by Miss Hill (more formally known as Dr. Sarah J. Hill). She is easily the best teacher I\u2019ve ever had.\u00a0 She taught astronomy as process<\/em>, as a history of ideas.\u00a0 My physics teachers said \u201cThis is how it is.\u201d But Miss Hill would say \u201cten years ago we thought…..\u00a0 But then new data came in and now we think this….\u201d She used to refer to the \u201cdoubling of the universe in 1952.\u201d Of course the real universe didn\u2019t suddenly grow in size, instead it was found that the variable stars we had been using as distance indicators actually came in two classes, one of which was twice as bright.\u00a0 So all the distances had to be recalibrated.\u00a0 For a discussion of Cepheid see link I have been able to use this process in struggling with depression and PTSD. More later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Denial is a common defense mechanism used to shield oneself from a painful truth.\u00a0 If you are an alcoholic, and making your family miserable, you will deny that it\u2019s drinking that\u2019s the problem.\u00a0 If you hurt your 3-year-old child, that … Continue reading
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\nWhenever Miss Hill introduced a new topic, she went through this process.\u00a0 First: what assumptions are we making?\u00a0 Second: what are the data?\u00a0 Third: what hypothesis can we frame to explain the data?\u00a0 And finally, can we find new data, hopefully from some different area of study, that will confirm or disprove our hypothesis?\u00a0 The most important steps are the first and the last.\u00a0 I had never had another teacher talk about assumptions and yet they will constrain what we are willing to accept as \u201cfacts.\u201d And too often, people get enamored of their hypothesis and refuse to see, or accept facts that contradict it.\u00a0 So by the time I read Thomas Kuhn\u2019s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em><\/a>, I knew very well the process he was talking about.\u00a0 And by the way, all of astronomy is founded on one huge whopping assumption: that the \u201claws\u201d of physics as we have discovered them in our laboratories here on the planet earth in the last 400 years \u2014 that these \u201claws\u201d hold true through out time and space.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 Are you feeling some resistance?<\/p>\n