Science

Shortly after building the first reflecting telescope, Sir Isaac Newton wrote to a disgruntled colleague: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Whether Newton was extremely eloquent or rather short, the sentiment remains – our knowledge has accumulated in small increments over the centuries thanks to the tireless work of dedicated individuals who sought to add to the betterment of mankind by learning from those who preceded them.

Fair enough, they didn’t always get it quite right. Scientists, like the rest of us, carry some crazy ideas and fall victim to their own superstition. Newton himself practised alchemy, had a strange view of Christianity and most of his written work dealt with the occult. Thankfully, his hobby was to explain the forces of the universe in his spare time. When describing Newton, the economist John Maynard Keynes said “He was not the first of the Age of Reason: He was the last of the magicians.”

Reason, observation and deduction are the foundation of the scientific method. These elements do not lead to certainty, but thrive on a continual cycle of uncertainty through constructive criticism and argument. When Socrates was told by the Oracle he was the wisest man in Greece, he disputed the claim by comparing himself with the great philosophers and artists in Athens at the time. He discovered, paradoxically, that he was indeed the wisest amongst his contemporaries because he was the only person certain of his own ignorance. Questions – not answers – are the tools of the scientist.

Natural selection needs a hand sometimes.

While Socrates was no scientist, the Ancient Greeks had their fair share of brainpower; through observation and reason Pythagoras and Archimedes helped deduce the laws of the natural world. The knowledge of such ‘giants’ was adopted by the Romans; preserved by the Arabs who combined it with science from India and China; translated by medieval monks in Islamic Spain; and finally brought back to Europe just in time for the Renaissance, the printing press and the Inquisition.

Being a scientist – or natural philosopher – was a risky business in the 17th Century. In a quest to understand god and the universe, men like Galileo had to juggle their new ideas, their faith and the very real threat of excommunication or worse.* Thankfully, some European scientists were spared the rack and the stake, allowing doubt and inquiry to run rampant during the Enlightenment; leading to what we call empiricism – the testing of hypotheses through repeated experiment.

New technology brought about by the Industrial Revolution saw a rapid expansion in the fields of science and brought about countless new discoveries (mainly brewing-related). To highlight the benefits of science in recent times would be redundant, however be sure that a scientist makes no discovery because she is certain – only because she asked the question. This is how peer-reviewed literature works and why it is so important to our understanding. Hypotheses are formulated, experiments are conducted, theories are tested and consensus is made based on the most probable outcome; that is all we have.

Geologists, astronomers, physicists, chemists and biologists demonstrate that humans are no longer the central character in a six thousand year old desert fable. We are liberated from the shackles of certainty and are able to celebrate that we are a miniscule scattering of atoms in a limitless universe, brought together for a brief moment in time, only to be scattered again once more. What for you ask? To take pleasure in the fact we can contribute a few pages to a cosmic book that has hardly been written.

* To be fair, the Catholic church apologised for this incident and confirmed that Galileo’s model of the solar system was indeed correct…in 1992.