Synopsis
The real world is what it is. Many very intelligent people have tried to tell us that it’s something other than what it is, and they’re quite well paid for doing this. While I was still working and teaching, the concepts presented in this book, which were gradually accumulating in my mind, had no outlet because they were effectively suppressed by such influences. Now that I’m retired, however, I can say what I think is right without fear of losing my funding or my job. Over some five decades of being a professional geologist, I gradually came to the disturbing realization that much of our "scientific understanding" of the Earth system depends on the centuries-old Cartesian approach, in which phenomena of interest are treated as if they were an assemblage of unrelated parts, arrayed in gridded museum drawers. Each such phenomenon could therefore be studied intensively in isolation, without respect to its interactions with other phenomena and could be described with detailed, and often sophisticated mathematics. Finally, important pronouncements about how all this dismembered reality actually fits and works together could be explained in the form of ingenious and elaborate theories. Both theories and mathematics, however, can have their own realities, and unfortunately they can be as illusory as the March Hare, leading us down assorted unproductive rabbit holes, where the best we can do is argue our clever points with liberal amounts of arm waving, dignified as they are by the peer-review process, but in fact, this approach simply perpetuates the unhappy view of the Earth system as a collection of unrelated parts in museum drawers, subject to various unhelpful, speculative unrealities. Synthetic science, on the other hand, which is the approach I use in this book, dispenses with the gridded museum drawers altogether and examines both the various phenomena and their interactions as functional parts of a single, integrated, dynamic organism. With this approach, using frequent reference to hard data as points of unarguable ground truth, it becomes far easier to understand both the phenomena and their interrelationships with far less chance of shooting off into avenues of irrelevance. Those who take note of my very spare use of mathematics and theory might suppose that I have carefully avoided including these for the sake of my lay audience. The actual truth is, however, that in treating the Earth system as a functional whole, I have found that the myriad interconnections among things make it possible to comprehend both the things and their interrelations without the need for either much mathematics or much theory, although I do make use of some fairly uncomplicated chemistry in this regard. In short, seeing the Earth system as an integrated whole makes interpretation a great deal simpler and more obvious than seeing it as an array of inert, dismembered parts. For me, this synthetic approach has been transformative. Not only has it allowed the Earth system to make far better scientific sense, but it has imbued me with a very uplifting sense of wonder and appreciation that I am so very fortunate as to be a part of all this. As I say, in a paragraph from the book: “Consider…, that a second example of what I am about to describe [Earth] is not to be found in our own Solar System, nor have we found, even with our most powerful telescopes, any shred of evidence for another such picture in any of the hundred octillion or so star systems that surround our own. Quite possibly, we must admit, such a picture might exist nowhere else but right here beneath our feet. Quite possibly, what we have been conditioned to view as mundane and pedestrian might actually be the most extraordinary marvel and the only true paradise we may ever hope to see, this spinning jewel of a home, our sacred Earth.”
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