How Science Can Help You Through Grief

Alan Townsend shares five key insights from This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist’s Path from Grief to Wonder.

Can science help you handle grief? It just might, according to Alan Townsend, author of the new book This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder. Alan is the author of more than 140 scientific articles and is the dean of the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation. When his wife and daughter were both diagnosed with brain cancer, he needed all his emotional and intellectual resources to handle the situation. He writes about how leaning on the scientific worldview helped him through difficult times, and he joins us now to share 5 of his key insights.

1. Science is about more than answers and solutions.

I once had a tendency to believe that science held the keys to nearly every answer humanity sought. Given sufficient time and effort, science could explain our planet and ourselves, and predict so much of what might come next. Of course, science is full of miraculous solutions to humanity’s needs and challenges and capable of remarkable predictive power. Look around you, think about how almost any day unfolds, and odds are just about everything you see and do have some direct connection to scientific discovery.