Atop a sacred mountain, a skirmish between pure science and religion

[cbayer]

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/05/30/could-science-and-religion-two-sides-same-coin/qQr3rrM5RpkvArCbdg5lTJ/story.html#

By Thomas Levenson MAY 31, 2015


DAN ZEDEK/GLOBE STAFF

By Thomas Levenson MAY 31, 2015

AT 13,796 FEET, Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii is the tallest point in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a confounding place. Like the Grand Canyon, it takes a surprising amount of time simply to believe your eyes. The summit and the valley immediately below the top are barren stretches of red-black rock. It’s hard not to think of Mars.

But then — at least for me, on my first visit in 1991 — the view opens up. Look north across the strait between the Big Island and Maui and there’s Haleakala, the next giant volcano in the chain. To the south, Mauna Kea’s twin, Mauna Loa, bulks across half the sky. West, past the golf courses and beach hotels of the Kohala coast, there’s nothing but the broad Pacific — on a clear day, a sheet of utterly, impossibly cobalt blue stretching to the edge of the earth.

No mere photograph prepares you for first sight on Mauna Kea. For me, the experience was shot through with two truths: how almost impossibly small each of us is within the natural world — and how utterly interconnected that world is, to itself and to each infinitesimal self peering though it.

Look at the peak rather than from it, though, and the scene shifts. Mauna Kea possesses a unique combination of attributes: usually clear skies, high altitude, stable air, almost no light pollution. The first astronomical observatory appeared on the mountaintop in 1970, a gleaming white dome visible for miles. In the 45 years since, the near-perfect observing conditions have brought a flock of telescopes to land on and just below the summit ridge, 13 in all, including the two largest optical instruments now in use.

more at link

[Yorktown]

1. And?

?

[skepticscott]

4. There is no "and"

Just "more at link" and if the thread doesn't go the way she wants it, she abandons it and tries to peddle her agenda some other way.

[skepticscott]

2. Despite a lot of flowery words by the author

he fails to show how this is anything but another instance of people demanding that they be deferred to because their religious sensibilities have been offended. Well, so fucking what? So they're offended. Why does that entitle them to any kind of deference or accommodation? The telescopes have been up there for 40+ years, so it's not as if they are suddenly preventing them from exercising their religion.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. That picture is obviously fake.

[edhopper]

5. I think we should let

Pele decide.
If she doesn't do anything to prevent it, that means she is okay with it.