Science in perspective

“I know that I know nothing”
Socrates

“Not knowing that one knows is best”
Lao Tzu

Science isn’t about definite answers to definite questions. Plato thought that the world we live in is a world of false idols and shadows (Republic, book VII, the Cave). He postulated that when we look at a tree, we really see the ideal tree in our mind and not the actual physical tree. Friedrich Nietzsche mirrors Palto’s thought in “The Gay Science”, where he writes that everything we see we reconstruct in our mind with the aid of previous experiences. The subjectivity of reality and the very tools with which we study nature, namely our senses and our mind, as well as our ideas about even the simplest facts in life have been questioned in the past and present. Democritus of Abdera (500 B.C.) said: ‘…by convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality nothing but Atoms and Void’ (Herbert 1987). David Hume, the empirical philosopher of the 18th century opposed the law of causality, one of the pillars of western thought. He maintained that when we say ‘…A causes B..’ we mean only that A and B are conjoined together in fact, so any time A happens, B follows. That does not mean however that B is caused by A. So for Hume the law of causality is actually a law of conjunction (Russell 1967). The ultimate stab into reality and the subjectivity of science came with the advent of Quantum Theory. The Copenhagen interpretation, backed by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, stated that there is no deep reality and that reality is created by observation (Herbert 1987). Nevertheless no one can doubt the power of scientific thought and its key role in the progress of our civilisation. Epicurus of Athens, considered to be a secular , hedonistic by some, philosopher detested the questioning of reality as he thought it to be of no practical importance. What matters for every scientific mind is a direct observation which can be formulated into a hypothesis and tested in a controlled laboratory environment. The outcome is accepted as a fact provided it can be replicated in different set-ups and by different individuals. However, the critical importance of the answers we get everyday in the lab should not undermine the importance of framing our questions in the appropriate context and keeping an open mind about the nature of reality, even if from a practical point of view it looks as if we understand how things work.