Intro 0:07
What can you do with your love of science we'll tell you?
Shekerah Primus 0:34
Hi, everyone, welcome back to another episode of your favorite podcast, We Love Science. We are your hosts. I am Shekerah.
Fatu Badiane Markey 0:46
And I'm Fatu and on today's show we're going back to the roots of pure science; I love that back to our roots.
Shekerah Primus 0:53
Yes, we are; science as natural philosophy; as it was in the beginning, so they say.
And our very special guest today is Dr. Richard Summers, who is an award winning theoretical biologist, as well as a prolific author; he's here today to tell us all about his new book which is boldly titled, Science as Natural Philosophy and Finding our Place in the Universe. I love it.
Like science and philosophy intertwining; very interesting, Richard, we are so very excited to have you on the show. Welcome, welcome.
Richard Summers 1:37
Well, thank you for allowing me to come and have these conversations. I'm also excited to be here.
Shekerah Primus 1:42
Excellent. So we're really looking forward to hearing all about your book and your career journey. But before we jump in, we all know we got to warm up right so we got to warm up are talking about our favorite topic, which food!
Richard Summers 2:05
That's one of my favorite topics too
Shekerah Primus 2:09
We're always happy to hear that because we love talking about food. So today's topic is
new foods.
So please, the question is describe a new dish or dessert that you tried recently. Fatu do you want to get us started?
Fatu Badiane Markey 2:30
Yeah. So when my mom was visiting, so I'm still in Nairobi for folks who didn't know that previously. Joining us for the first time. So there is this little like, restaurant, you know, around the corner from where I live, and they only have three things on the menu. So the main thing that they serve is fried, or I should say cooked tilapia, and you and it's basically fried and you can get it with like I guess you know, some kind of traditional sauce as a topping; a coconut sauce as a topping; or just plain. Yeah. And then they eat it with ugali which is like, like a maize porridge like a thick maize porridge, which is like, it's like between a porridge and a bread which is like their staple; and then what they call greens which are greens; kale or something like that. So, yeah. So I tried that with my mom and we got the coconut tilapia and it was amazing out of this world. It was like, fan tastic. Yeah, so really, really good. Yeah.
Shekerah Primus 3:41
So is it just like three different types of tilapia with three different types of sauces. That's it.
Fatu Badiane Markey 3:47
That's it.
Shekerah Primus 3:49
Oh, my God. That's amazing.
Fatu Badiane Markey 3:53
Yes. Listen, the way they sauce it up when they sauce it, like they did they just do it right. It's like swimming and sauce. So it's so good. It's so good. Yeah. And yeah, and tilapia is one of the more common fishes here because they have lakes. So you know, they eat a lot of tilapia. Yeah. Yeah, cool, because I want to try it when I come see you. Yeah, I'll put on the list. I'll put it on the list. Most definitely. What about you, Richard?
Richard Summers 4:31
Well, I grew up on the Gulf Coast close to New Orleans. I was used to eating gumbo and crawfish; and for some reason, I had never tried crawfish etouffe.
Shekerah Primus 4:48
I think I tried the New Orleans.
Richard Summers 4:53
It's creamier than gumbo. Definitely is comfort food. It combines a variety of Cajun spices with a cream or milk sauce and makes the base; and crawfish tails are sauteed and put in and served over rice. It's it's definitely worth a try. It's really good.
Shekerah Primus 5:18
That's kind of amazing. I love crawfish. I love seafood in general and crawfish is like a river food but oh my gosh, I love it. And I tried that when I went to New Orleans a couple years ago and it is delicious. My mouth is watering; right your mouth starts watering.
Fatu Badiane Markey 5:41
As soon as I heard I grew up near the Gulf Coast. My stomach started rumbling; I knew it would be a good food story. What about you Shekerah?
Shekerah Primus 5:53
Yeah, so I'm actually going to end with desert. So it's almost like we planned this perfectly even though we didn't really plan it right; it's like perfect. I'm gonna end with a dessert. So I tried recently, this cake called tres leches, which is something that is really popular in like Latin American countries. And it's called tres leches, and so if you translate it, that's like three milks, right? Just milk, it's not just the milk. But this really nice like light fluffy cake. And it has like this drizzle of like a combination of three milks on it. So it's like that's kind of that's kind of like the sauce that so the cake is sort of soaked in. And I believe it's a mix of evaporated milk, condensed milk and whole milk. So tres leches; three milks; it's really, it's really good and I got kind of obsessed with it. I would have it like every time I was close to a Latin, a Latin restaurant, I'd go in and be like,
Oh do you have tres leches?
Fatu Badiane Markey 7:03
That's so funny.
Richard Summers 7:07
Several of the restaurants down here that serve that? It's very good.
Fatu Badiane Markey 7:13
I feel like, if, for whatever reason I know I've seen it on menus, but I feel like I've never ordered it. So now I need to.
Shekerah Primus 7:20
Yeah, to me tres leches; three milks? Is he bringing me like warm milk? What is that?
Fatu Badiane Markey 7:30
Maybe that's also why I haven't gotten into it. I just I couldn't get past the name.
Shekerah Primus 7:35
All right. Thank you both so much excellent food science talk as usual. So let's jump into the work segment. So our guest today is Dr. Richard Summers, who has had a distinguished career at the University of Mississippi Medical Center; serving in the several roles on the faculty there including Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine, as well as Vice Chancellor for Research. So Richard, you've contributed both as a medical professional and as a scientist, which is very inspiring. Among your many research and career interests includes theoretical biology, which is right over my head and space as in outer space also; over all our heads. And so you've contributed, you studied and so you studied how the human body adapts to microgravity in space during spaceflight, which is so incredibly important for astronauts. So you've worked with astronauts and you were previously the lead scientist for the NASA digital astronaut project, which is very cool. And lastly, you are an incredibly prolific author. You've co authored more than 300 publications so far. I'm saying so far, right? We know there's more coming. And that includes books like the book that you're here to talk to us about. Today, which again, is titled, Science as Natural Philosophy and Finding our Place in the Universe, that just makes me smile, finding our place in the universe. So Richard, let's start simply, what is science as natural philosophy? There's probably not a simple answer, but can you explain that concept for us?
Richard Summers 9:39
So we, you know, we tend to think about science as being synonymous with technology. And it's true that science has greatly improved our lives and perfecting what our technology looks like everything from antibiotics to cell phones, and likewise, technology has helped expand scientific discoveries and do that. However, their original tenor of science back to the days of Aristotle and Pythagoras and Greek philosophers, was as a methodology for creating a worldview and a way to understand the world around us and to find our place in the universe. In fact this scientific approach to understanding was called Natural Philosophy back then; there was not it was not until 1834 when Cambridge scholar William Weathwelll, first termed did as science from the Latin word for knowledge.
Shekerah Primus 10:37
I did not know that, that is interesting.
Okay.
Richard Summers 10:43
The science for Aristotle was less empirical, not you know, doing the experiments and things like that, because they didn't have a lot of tools to do experiments. It was more deductive and there was no hard scientific methodology of objectivity that we think about with science today. And they had to rely on logical deduction for recent thinking about that. So for instance, the scientists, they are ancient, natural philosophers assumed that we on Earth were the center of the universe. It's obvious to them that the sun and moon were revolving around them and it did not seem that the Earth was moving; they felt they didn't feel it. This changed 1543 when Copernicus formulated his heliocentric theory of the solar system, with the sun at the center, and this was based on emerging celestial observations, and this attempt was really the beginning of the scientific revolution. In fact, that's where the word revolution came from. He had a different view, we were revolving around the sun.
Shekerah Primus 12:02
Very cool.
Richard Summers 12:03
This led to, this led to the Age of Enlightenment. However, the Roman Catholic Church at that time had other ideas based upon their interpretation of Scripture and rejected the view that we were not the center of God's creation. They actually confined Galileo to house arrest for his, rest of his life for supporting this idea. That's something that's not heard about very often but more recently, the Roman Catholic Church, apologized, to Galileo. But still, it was really a sea change in the way of thinking that the pinnacle of the scientific way of thinking came when Isaac Newton provided a foundation for the laws and methods of science that eventually led to what we know as the Industrial Revolution and modern science and the practical application to develop new technologies. However, nothing ever changed, stays the same things always change and this Newtonian worldview changed at the beginning of the 20th century, as we began to explore the quantum world and Einsteinian relative relativity and discovered that there appeared to be a central role for the observer and determining the contents of phenomena and physical reality. And the Schrodinger Heisenberg uncertainty principle determined that that it really was the experience of the quantum that made the determination of what that reality looked like. So at that time, there was what we called a Copernican reversal, in which our physical position might not be considered as the center of the universe, but our perceiving observer certainly seem to be central. This was even true in mathematics when girdle Incompleteness theorem was formulated, and the ability for separate self reference and mathematics was critical for complete and logical consistency. His idea stemmed from the old paradox you've heard before when the Christian says all creations are liars. Is that statement true? If it is, or is he lying because he's a creation? It's a paradox in itself and, and only the creation himself knows what the truth is? Because he's the central observer and the arbiter of the reality. The strange paradoxes and observations were codependent and they led to the emergence of a idea that science is a kind of natural philosophy and a way for us to understand the world and our place in it. More than just the handmaiden of technology, it's really a worldview. And what became clear is there was a need for better understanding of science involved in the act of observing or experiencing; we need to understand the mechanics of biological experience and information processing. And perhaps a new scientific method should be formulated that include both first person and third person experiences. This was actually proposed by the Dalai Lama at a conference on science and philosophy and he wrote about it in his book, The Universe in an Atom. So those are all the ideas that I think that that are extremely important to think about. As really, yes, science will continue to help us in our scientific development of technologies. It's really a worldview and philosophy.
Speaker 1 13:16
So I was saying, that's so interesting. And so different from how we think of science today like you were saying, right, taking a role of observer. That's really not what we do in science today. We take the role of experimenter, right? We formulate the hypothesis, this is what's going on and then we test the hypothesis, right to either prove or disprove. So, we have so much more of a direct role in science today. Do you think that that is just a sort of a normal way that science has advanced like, is there not enough left to just sit and observe and we have this sort of directed; we have to sort of drive it these days to really figure things out anymore?
Shekerah Primus 17:19
What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 17:21
Well it's been very successful as a third person observer kind of position and, but even back in the days, when Karl Popper was identifying what were the rules around the scientific method, there were some objections because each individual experiment is observed by a first person. And it's only that we have consilience among us that that we have similar observations because we have similar biology that experiences the same thing, but there's no way that I can know the blue you see is exactly the blue I see. We do know that we shared the common biology in that then particular radiation wave hits our our retina and excites same particular molecule in the same particular way. So we know that we share that experience, but the real experience of blue or what it is the color blue. We can never know that you're in my experience of blue is the same.
Shekerah Primus 18:29
Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting that you bring that up because I heard about there is I forget which country but people are trained to see different types of greens and blues. And so they see the rainbow differently than us in the Western Hemisphere. See the rainbow. So it's so interesting that you bring up; I don't know if the red I see the same red you see; here the blue I see it's it's so interesting.
Richard Summers 18:58
And colorblind people of course see it differently; a different way; so so that while we we have been very successful using an objective approach to science for third person, there still will always be somewhat of a barrier that it can only be including the first person and that's really kind of a different approach and thinking about science.
Shekerah Primus 19:33
So what kinds of things other than all the things that you just mentioned, I'm sure are already in your book, but can you tell us what other kinds of things people can expect to learn about from reading this book?
Richard Summers 19:49
Well, you know, we think about science, philosophy and religion, religion is being completely separate and unrelated, conflicting schools of thought. I think my book now, the dots between the scientific perspective and those of philosophy and religion are broad scale. Not each each individual religion or philosophy or whatever, but just on, whether it's general intent was and because it does have common intent for all of us to want to better understand our world. And so, science has a worldview, it has that same intent that philosophy and religion does is to have a better experience and understanding of our world.
Shekerah Primus 20:35
Yeah, I agree with that. Very cool. It sounds like your book will be a real, could be a force in joining lots of different types of people who think differently and think that they're so different, and these people don't understand me and they don't understand where I'm coming from and how I'm thinking. But this would be a really great way to join these different types of people who have different ways of thinking, I love that. Yeah. So what about yourself, Richard, I know that you did a lot of research it's obvious. Just listening to you speak, that you did a lot of research to write this book. Can you share with us one thing that you learned about researching for this book that you thought was just so fascinating?
Richard Summers 21:27
This is my favorite question. You know, again, you know, we think of science and religion and then, as in very different things, and the twain shall never meet. But in relating those connections, I found that there are some deep insights that were espoused even back in the ancients that were spot on. And what has emerged today is modern scientific thinking. Is that of observer having a central role in science and quantum mechanics and relativity. For instance, Nagarjuna, who was a famous Buddhist philosopher, some people even coined the second Buddha, in the second century AD formulated this concept of emptiness and which he thought about things as being devoid of any separate intrinsic substance or reality, and only had existence relative to the relationship to other entities and consequently, consequently the whole of everything in general. This interdependence of everything led to the notion that there's a codependent arising of our reality now this this idea has really been embraced by some very well respected scientists such as Carlo Rovelli and it was also embraced by great thinkers such as John Wheeler, who was a colleague of both Einstein and Niels Bohr to consider that we live in what they called a participator universe. Going even beyond the observer role that we obviously know from quantum physics, relativity, that we were actually participators in creating what is this reality? I think also, ancient philosophical concept of a co arising of everything helps make sense of some of the difficult conceptions in modern physics. Such as quantum mechanics, and particularly the anthropic principle. I don't know if you're familiar with the anthropic principle that notes that we live in a Goldilocks universe and that the conditions are just right in our universe for the internal evolution of biological entities. They're really different. If water you had different consistency; if these things were any different than biology could never evolve. And so it kind of completes the circle in which the observer plays a role in that determine the reality, as we've seen in quantum mechanics, and the observer, is part of that same reality that is made up of those same quantum atoms and things like that. So I think it's some summed up in, in this work of a recent masterpiece book, The Second Law of Thermodynamics that was written by Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of Mathematica, and he says in a quote, in that book, general relativity, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, which is thermodynamics, are actually drivable, and from the same ultimate foundation, which is the interplay between computational irreducibility and the computational boundedness of observers. Again, this, this interplay between the physical world and the observer is absolutely central to our understanding of the co arising of the relative universe. And the observers is the aperture for which the whole universe actually gets to know itself gets to understand itself. And it's truly fascinating to me that Nagarjuna a Buddhist philosopher monk from 2000 years ago had this philosophically in this perspective, so that was kind of a shock to me and something that I really learned. It's, it's interesting and fascinating.
Shekerah Primus 25:27
That's really cool. That's interesting. So is it like we, we are observing our reality, but we're also creating our reality at the same time, so it's all sort of like a circle. That's interesting.
Richard Summers 25:41
Thanks right.
Fatu Badiane Markey 25:42
Look at you Shekerah; philosophizing over here.
Shekerah Primus 25:50
So that was a philosopher, put that forth. You said hundreds of years ago and now we're really looking at it. It's through the eyes of science.
Richard Summers 26:02
Science is finding those same times. Yeah. Things like time and space are relative to our observations. We're creating what the framework of time and space are, and even in the quantum level, I famously, John Wheeler said that a phenomena is not a phenomenon until it's an observed phenomenon. Yeah. Because quantum mechanics says that, that momentum or velocity is not determined that that we actually observe it and it just exists in a superposition as they say, until they work. That's what Schroeder's cat is all about. Those are those are very interesting things to me.
Shekerah Primus 26:57
Very cool. Very like spacey. You got my skin kind of tingling. How it's all connected. Very cool. Okay, so what do you you've done a lot of writing Richard, tell us what do you love about writing?
Unknown Speaker 27:19
So, in Mississippi, we have a very deep and strong tradition of storytelling. Such as William Faulkner; Tennesse Williams John Grisham. I can give you a long list of authors that come from Mississippi. Even Mississippi blues singers like Robert Johnson and Elvis Presley were essentially telling stories in their songs. I think science has some great important stories to tell. And they don't have to be dry and and and difficult to understand. They can be stories that can be interesting and exciting and something like that. Like we mentioned earlier, Schroeders cat is an interesting story to tell. That illustrates something that's very important. Writing allows me to express complex thoughts in a way that is difficult in a personal setting. I sometimes labor for days over just the right words and a single sentence while writing; when I find this word, Oh, finally it's great. I wear my thesaurus out. Finding a word that matches what I'm trying to do. And so that's what I love about writing, being able to tell the story; tell the story of of what I am trying to portray.
Shekerah Primus 28:48
That's so special. Thank you for sharing that with us.
Shekerah Primus 0:06
Okay, so on the flip side of that, what do you find most challenging about the writing process or something that you might change if
you if you could?
Richard Summers 0:18
Well, I really believe that good writing just has to flow out it has to flow out. There's, there's weeks that I feel like I can't write a decent sentence and I think people would call it a writer's block. And you just have to stop until you feel motivated again, or move to write again, this can be slow and arduous and frustrating. I can force myself that it never comes out. Well, that way I go back and read what I wrote when I forced myself and it's not what I'm the; though I do think it is important that you sit and try every day. If not, get out of the habit and procrastinate before you know it, you're not writing anything. You least have to sit down make an effort and if it's not flowing, just stop. The other frustrating thing I think, I don't like the editorial process that in most journals or publishing houses, they often end up trying to change the intended meaning of what what you're trying to portray. And that's why I chose my publishing houses, particularly because they left me more editorial license. And let me use my words to say, implicitly, we're the subject matter experts of what we're trying to write and so we should be able to express it in the way we think is best.
Shekerah Primus 1:51
Yeah. Oh, gosh, you just made so many very, very important points. I think. For writers even me just writing you know, little blogs and things my sister likes to write too. And she says, you know, the sun, and the moon, in the clouds, and everything has to align.
I get what you're saying. Yeah, it all has to sort of align and you could feel it right when it's coming out, right? Feel it. There's like, oh, my gosh, your brain is working so well. I don't want to stop and my brain is working so well. Right now. It's on to figure out like, what are the things that I need to do get my brain in that flow state all the time, I would just live in flow
And then what you mentioned about the publishing process being, you know, so difficult and frustrating. I think that's probably part of the reason why a lot of people now like they try to self publish, right? Instead of going through, you know, traditional publishing. And then you have all the lots and lots and lots of blogs these days, because people want to be able to, you know, keep what they wrote as their own, you know, to sort of have ownership of that and be like my words and say the way I said it, and you know, I know how it should sound and you don't know better than me just because they're the editor right? Like, sure I talk about it. But I want to have some control over my work. And so I definitely get that.
Richard Summers 3:22
As long as it's balanced with some peer review and that's the only problem I see with self publishing. There's no peer review. And there's been there's been times where the peer review actually pointed out things that I should have realized and went back and changed and then I think that's important. So but we've got to have some balance. They're not. It's not there right now.
Shekerah Primus 3:47
I get that your feedback is important. But the publisher the like to like take control, right? It's not just feedback. As is controlling the content, which is difficult for authors to deal with. Yeah.
Fatu Badiane Markey 3:59
I also really like that connection to writing because I feel like that is also such an important part of science. And suppose we overlook, how you kind of talk about what it is that you're seeing, or if you're now you know, getting into natural philosophy and you want to be the observer. How is it that you talk about what you're observing? And that's just yeah, so important to connecting to the work. I really like the way that you explained that Richard. I think that was really nicely done.
Shekerah Primus 4:31
Agreed. So what advice you just give lots of wonderful advice, but what advice if you had to give a single piece of advice to someone who was interested in writing a book about science? What advice would you give to that person?
Speaker 1 4:46
Well, the most satisfying thing for me for this current book that just wrote it as I've had several reviews that allotted the amount of research that had gone in and what surprised me somewhat, and I didn't do a lot of research to do it. But Science writing probably required a greater amount of research and the information available too broad and varied in opinion. And, and so you have to really go through a lot of material to really find the right place. My advice would be to begin with a clear understanding of what you're trying to convey. And then research the subject heavily to hone your expression of that and that you can't, you can't shortcut that kind of research trail to find that you left out something that was very important in trying to make your point.
Shekerah Primus 5:44
Very good advice. Thank you.
Okay, so to end the work segment, we have a little teachable moment here. Science is natural philosophy mini quiz, where
Fatu and I are going to be on the hot seats. Right. So please give us Richard one or two simple questions to you know, test their knowledge and ultimately teach something else. About,
you know, the evolution of scientific thought or even about writing a book in general that may not have been covered
Fatu Badiane Markey 6:41
during this segment so far.
Richard Summers 6:44
There are two questions I've prepared. Okay. The first one is who wrote a famous book with the term natural philosophy is a central part of its title. Was, was it Charles Darwin? Was it Isaac Newton, or was it Bertrand Russell?
Fatu Badiane Markey 7:05
You can go first Shekerah.
Shekerah Primus 7:12
Charles Darwin,
Fatu Badiane Markey 7:14
I was going to guess that also, but it's not correct.
Okay. Isaac Newton.
Richard Summers 7:20
Isaac Newton, actually, some people, people say it's the most famous most important book in all the history of science. Isaac Newton wrote what's called the mathematical principles of natural philosophy, where he outlined his basic laws of physics that we've been using today and then a lot of technologies and things like that. So he even back then was calling this natural philosophy. He was not calling it science,
Shekerah Primus 7:56
Right. Very cool. Cool question. Okay. 10 points for Fatu; I gotta catch up. What's the second one?
Richard Summers 8:06
The second question is who said, this is a quote, The ultimate aim of the whole of science is indeed to clarify a man's position in relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position. That's kind of what my theme of my book is. Was it Albert Einstein? Was a Jaquez Maunad, or was it Francis Crick. All three were Nobel Prize winners.
Shekerah Primus 8:38
Fatu you go first.
Fatu Badiane Markey 8:41
I'm gonna guess Francis Crick.
Shekerah Primus 8:45
Okay, I'm gonna guess. I'm gonna guess the second one that I can't say the name; the Jacques.
Was it Jacques?
Richard Summers 8:59
You got it right; he won a prize for biochemistry, passing the work of Francis Crick. The mechanics of of DNA translated into actual proteins and structures. But he also understood that biology must be accorded the central position if we're going to understand our relationship to the universe.
Shekerah Primus 9:32
Excellent. I learned so much today. Thank you for preparing that little quiz for us.
And so Richard, thanks again so much for talking with us today. It was a pleasure hearing about your book and all the wonderful advice you gave and everything that you had to say.
Richard Summers 9:52
Thank you.
Shekerah Primus 9:55
Excellent. So before we we jump into the journey segment, can you please just let us know how can people reach you if they would like to, and where can they purchase where can we purchase your amazing
book please let us know?
Richard Summers 10:11
The book is available both from Amazon but it's maybe a little bit cheaper directly from the publisher, which is Cambridge Scholars Publishing and in England, and I think it'd be worth the read for you. It's it's very important.
Shekerah Primus 10:29
Sounds very interesting. And is there a way that people can reach us specifically by email, by?
Richard Summers 10:35
My email addresses is R summers - SUMMERS- @umc.edu.
Shekerah Primus 10:43
Excellent. So we'll be sure to put all of those links in the show. notes so that people can reach you, Fatu any additional questions for the segment?
Fatu Badiane Markey 10:52
Oh, None for me. I'm
just like, basking in philosophy and everything that we've discussed. It's just like honestly been so I feel like enriching. You know, and I've really enjoyed that.
Richard Summers 11:04
Thank you for allowing me.
Outtro 11:07
Thank you to our listeners for supporting the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode. Please subscribe, like and share. To learn more about our guest journey. Be sure to listen to the next journey episode and you can reach out to us by email at the love science podcast@gmail.com. Please send any questions or comments about the show, or suggestions for guests that you'd like to hear on the show. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time,
Transcribed by https://otter.ai