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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Why I Love Science!!!!!

I'm a science major- a hard science major (only slight offense intended). I love spending time in chemistry labs talking about rates of reaction and organic chemistry. I love talking about everything from the smallest electron orbital to the human body and to huge geological features. I love celebrating the life and creation of my Heavenly Father as I study the world around me!

In fact, my science classes here on BYU's campus have been some of my most spiritually inspiring courses. Dr. Bell (now the Dean of Undergraduate Education) taught my PDBio 120 class back in the day. He would stand on the desk when he got excited and gave us candy when we talked about high-energy electrons. And he gave an unforgettable lecture, one that to this day I refer back to. It was one of our last days of class and the topic was Evolution. We discussed the Church's stand of the subject and it's implications for us as Latter-day Saint scientists. In the last ten minutes of class, he bore his testimony in such a way that left an impression on my spirit. He testified that the more he studied science, the more he was able to find Heavenly Father .

Now onto the more specfic topic for class, evolution and moore's law. This semester I am taking a Genetics class and delving more into that field. Even the development of theory within this field is astounding. Hippocrates believed that we had mini body parts (gemmules) floating around inside us and that sex involved the transfer of said parts to make a whole person. Aristotle and the Greeks used to believe in "pre-formation", or the idea that we carried little tiny pre formed people around in us that slowly grew to the size of a baby until they were born. And these ideas stuck around for awhile actually. Darwin himself believed in gemmules, though he couldn't find a mechanism.

That is what is so fantastic about science- it changes with exploration and discovery. We can understand it one way, only to learn later that something else is more true. What do you love about science?

1 comment:

  1. I love science too! I know that calculus isn't science, but when I was taking it as a senior in high school I often thought that God could be bound in the intricacy of the numbers. My cousin Ali would often wonder why I liked it so much . . but the truth is that it just spoke to me and made sense to me!

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