This posting is based on a comment I felt compelled to make on someone else's blog. That blog brought to my attention something I have thought about and discussed with others many times over the years. Few people would disagree that science is to be praised for doing us many favours in terms of revealing how the universe really works and allowing us to discover, thereby, new ways of improving our lives. Many people, however, perhaps even most people, feel that science has a regrettable side in that, for every discovery made, there is one less mystery to make our lives exciting and fun.
For myself, having been science oriented since childhood and involved directly in a number of scientific disciplines during my adult life, I find it difficult to understand how people can hold this opinion and I certainly have never felt that way myself. Not knowing what something is or how it works (another word for this is ignorance), replacing the scientific search for knowledge with ancient religious dogma or fairy tales, adds no more mystery to our lives than would throwing a blanket over something and wondering what's under it, or wearing blinders and wondering what it is that we can't see.
The real universe, and in fact each discoverable part of the universe, holds so much more mystery than any mere human being could possibly imagine. Each discovery made always leads to several more mysteries that we never even suspected were there. Every discovery in astronomy has only served to expand our universe as we understand it, not shrink it. Every discovery in biology has raised new mysteries about the incredible variety and versatility of DNA, RNA and biological cells.
There was a time when, taught by dogma, we "knew" that the universe consisted only of our solar system surrounded by a few stars, sterile of life, and that surrounded, only a few miles away, by the abodes of the gods. Now we find ourselves living in a visible universe, over 27 billion light years across, containing potentially uncountable trillions of inhabitable planets. This visible universe is perhaps held within an infinite universe, or even an infinite number of universes, potentially with different basic physical laws. Even something as familiar, predictable and understandable on the surface as the movement of billiard balls has become mysterious when we examine it in the light of our developing understanding of quantum mechanics plus the fact that billiard balls and tables are made up of unpredictable subatomic particles. What scientists do, simultaneously with adding to our understanding of how things work, is add to our store of mysteries; and that is nothing if not exciting and fun.
There was a time when, taught by dogma, we "knew" that the universe consisted only of our solar system surrounded by a few stars, sterile of life, and that surrounded, only a few miles away, by the abodes of the gods. Now we find ourselves living in a visible universe, over 27 billion light years across, containing potentially uncountable trillions of inhabitable planets. This visible universe is perhaps held within an infinite universe, or even an infinite number of universes, potentially with different basic physical laws. Even something as familiar, predictable and understandable on the surface as the movement of billiard balls has become mysterious when we examine it in the light of our developing understanding of quantum mechanics plus the fact that billiard balls and tables are made up of unpredictable subatomic particles. What scientists do, simultaneously with adding to our understanding of how things work, is add to our store of mysteries; and that is nothing if not exciting and fun.
