My thoughts about science 2011

My thoughts about science 2011

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein: This quote highlights the idea that our existing consciousness can sometimes hinder our ability to learn and understand new concepts.

Dogma is dangerous

The arrogance of learned men.

Science is a wonderful thing. Science led us to space travel and the human genome. Science is the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Science is computers and cell phones. Science changed our civilization, our life, and our understanding of the world. Science proved to be a very effective and efficient tool to help people discover the secrets of the universe and improve lives. So, it is no wonder that many take science as an indisputable and omnipotent realm. For those people, science is the only way to obtain knowledge and understanding of the world. Are there any limitations on what we learn by using scientific research? The short answer – we do not know. Do we know a better approach, a better way to gain an understanding of the Universe?

Is there a better or perhaps a different approach?

Every new theory, every new physical law, every new discovery is a closer approximation to the truth. But, in my opinion, we will never know the whole truth. Can humanity gain the ultimate knowledge, the full understanding of the world? The Universe is a dynamic system; it is constantly changing, developing. We have to admit that full understanding of the Universe by applying the scientific method may be impossible.

I tried to put our limitations in numbers

The universal horizon is about 13 billion light years away. By some calculations, the size of the Universe is about 158 billion light years, which means that we can see only 0.05% of the Universe. In addition, what we are able to see are the images from the past. The further we look, the more distant the past is.

But even what we can see, the matter we can detect, is just a small part of what is out there. The visible matter in the Universe, the one that our instruments can detect, is just 4% of what is out there. The rest, the other 96%, is what we call Dark Matter and Dark Energy; in other words, we do not have a clue what it is. So, altogether, we possibly may be able to see only 0.002% of the Universe.

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”Richard P. Feynman

Now what about Evolution? Is it a complete theory?

Here are some excerpts:

"Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them" (David Kitts, paleontologist and evolutionist).

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places" (Francis Hitching, archaeologist).

"But as by THIS THEORY innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we NOT find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" -Charles Darwin

Yes, scientific accomplishments are impressive. But it is very humbling to realize how little we know.

“It is necessary, I believe, to accept this idea, not only for science, but also for other things; it is of great value to acknowledge ignorance. It is a fact that when we make decisions in our life we don't necessarily know that we are making them correctly; we only think that we are doing the best we can – and that is what we should do.”

Fhttp://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm

There is another aspect to the scientific methods of today.

In order to discover deeper qualities of matter, we smash things into each other. We build giant machines to smash matter into smaller and smaller pieces. Is there a possibility that the whole is more than the sum of its parts? Take the computer, for example. What will we discover by smashing it into small pieces? Will we know about the electricity and the software that makes a computer a computer? Do we need a different approach to understand Nature not from the inside out but from the outside in? Should we look for the software?

What irritates me a lot is the condescending, all-knowing attitude of many learned people toward any ideas and philosophy that are outside today's mainstream scientific dogmas.

Mysticism, Eastern philosophy, New Age, religion. Each one follows a different path in the eternal quest for knowledge, for understanding the world. I think that part of the problem is the way science is taught at schools. Kids are given a boring set of facts or dogmas to learn and memorize.

But science, our world, is a wonderful mystery, an adventure. Science is the quest to open new horizons, new secrets, new understanding of the world. Kids love mystery, secrets, adventure; and that is what science is to real scientists.

Psychologist Hudson gave Getzels-Jackson tests to 95 schoolboys, aged 15 to 17. To his own surprise, the top scores came from those specializing in history and English literature. The least creative, according to Hudson's findings: physical science students. Young scientists, says Hudson, "tend to be less intellectually flexible than young arts specialists, and more restricted emotionally."