The Scientific Perspective

The Scientific Perspective

by : Aria Ratmandanu 

             Children come into the world believing it all revolves around them, and so did humanity. People have always been anxious to understand their universe, but for most of human history we hadn’t yet developed the means. Since we are proactive and imaginative animals, we didn’t let the lack of tools stop us. We simply applied our imagination to form compelling pictures. These pictures were not based on reality, but were created to serve our needs. We would all like to be immortal. We’d like to believe that good triumphs over evil, that a greater power watches over us, that we are part of something bigger, that we have been put here for a reason. We’d like to believe that our lives have an intrinsic meaning. Ancient concepts of the universe comforted us by affirming these desires. Where did the universe come from? Where did life come from? Where did people come from?  and that our Earth was the center of everything.

                Today science can answer many of the most fundamental questions of existence. Science’s answers spring from observation and experiment rather than from human “bias or desire. Science offers answers in harmony with nature as it is, rather than nature as we’d like it to be.

              The universe is an awe-inspiring place, especially for those who know something about it. The more we learn, the more astonishing it seems. Newton said that if he saw further it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Today we can all stand on the shoulders of scientists and see deep and amazing truths about the universe and our place in it. We can understand how we and our Earth are natural phenomena that arise from the laws of physics. Our ancestors viewed the night sky with a sense of wonder, but to see stars that explode in seconds and shine with more light than entire galaxies brings a new dimension to the awe. In our day a scientist can turn her telescope to observe an Earthlike planet trillions of miles away, or study a spectacular internal universe in which a million million atoms conspire to create a tiny freckle. We know now that our Earth is one world among many and that our species arose from other species (whose members we may not wish to invite into our living rooms but who are our ancestors nonetheless). Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility, one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals. In such a universe it can seem that people are insignificant, but what is significant and profound is that we, ensembles of almost uncountable numbers of unthinking atoms, can become aware, and understand our origins and the nature of the cosmos in which we live.

           Most people feel that scientific explanations are sterile and reductive, diminishing humankind to a mere collection of atoms, no different in kind from any other object in the universe. But scientific knowledge does not diminish our humanity any more than the knowledge that our country is one among many diminishes our appreciation of our native culture. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Emotion, intuition, adherence to authority—traits that drive the belief in mystical explanation—are traits that can be found in other primates, and even in lower animals. But orangutans cannot reason about the angles in triangles, and macaque monkeys do not look to the heavens and wonder why the planets follow elliptical paths. It is only humans who can engage in the wondrous processes of reason and thought called science, only humans who can understand themselves and how their planet got here, and only humans who could discover the atoms that form us.

           The triumph of humanity is our capacity to understand. It is our comprehension of the cosmos, our insight into where we came from, our vision of the place we occupy in the universe, that sets us apart. A by-product of this scientific understanding is the power to harness nature for our benefit, or, it is true, to employ it to our detriment. The particular ethical and moral choices people make depend on human nature, and human culture. People dropped boulders on their enemies long before they understood the law of gravity. And they spewed filth into the skies long before they understood the thermodynamics of burning coal.

         Most people criticizes science for its vision of life as “essentially materialistic.” By materialistic, They do not mean to suggest that scientists are focused only on things and the desire to possess them, but that scientists deal only with phenomena we can see, hear, smell, detect with instruments, or measure with numbers. He contrasts the visible, or detectable, universe studied by science with an implicitly superior but invisible “realm of infinite possibility” that lies beyond our senses, a “transcendent domain” that is the source of all visible things. They argue passionately that only by accepting this realm can science grow beyond its limits and help save the world. But arguing that such a realm can expand the limits of science, that it can help humanity. If you think you are eating a cheeseburger, and I tell you that in some other unseen realm it is really a filet mignon, you’d want to know how I know this, and what evidence supports my idea. Only those answers can enable a belief to transcend wish fulfillment, so if they are to be convincing, those questions are the challenges he must address.

               The real issue, as most people say, is knowledge and how you attain it. They criticize science for denying “the worth of subjective experience.” But science wouldn’t have gotten very far if one scientist described a helium atom as “pretty heavy” while another noted that “it feels light to me.” Scientists employ precise objective measurements and precise objective concepts for good reason, and the fact that they seek to ensure that their measurements and concepts are not influenced by “love, trust, beauty, awe, wonder, compassion,” etc., does not mean that they dismiss the value of those qualities in other areas of life.

                Scientists are often guided by their intuition and subjective feelings, but they recognize the need for another step: verification. Science proceeds in a loop of observation, theory, and experiment. The loop is repeated until the theory and the empirical evidence are in harmony. But this method would fail if concepts were not precisely defined and experiments were not rigorously controlled. These elements of the scientific method are crucial, and it is they that determine the difference between good science and bad science, or between science and pseudoscience.

           I do not suggest that science is perfect. They say that science has never achieved pure objectivity, and they are right. For one, the concepts employed in science are concepts conceived by the human brain. Aliens with different brain structures, thought processes, and sense organs might view matter in completely different, but equally valid, ways. And if there is a certain kind of subjectivity to our concepts and our theories, there is also subjectivity in our experiments. In fact, experiments that have been done on experimenters show that there is a tendency for scientists to see what they want to see, and to be convinced by data they wish to find convincing. Yes, scientists, and science, are fallible. Yet all these are reasons not to doubt the scientific method, but to follow it as scrupulously as possible”

             History shows that the scientific method works. Being only human, some scientists may at first resist new and revolutionary ideas, but if a theory’s predictions are confirmed by experiment, the new theory soon becomes mainstream. For example, in 1982, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall discovered the Helicobacter pylori bacteria, and hypothesized that it causes ulcers. Their work was not well received because at the time scientists firmly believed that stress and lifestyle were the major   causes of peptic ulcer disease. Yet further experiments bore out their claims, and by 2005 it had been established that Helicobacter pylori causes more than 90 percent of duodenal ulcers and up to 80 percent of gastric ulcers, and Warren and Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize. Science would also embrace Deepak, if his claims were true.

            When theories that people are passionate about are brushed off by the science community, cries of closed-mindedness often emerge. But the history of science shows that the real reason for the rejection of theories is that they clash with observational evidence. In fact, some very weird ideas, arising sometimes from very obscure and unexpected quarters—ideas like relativity and quantum uncertainty—have quickly gained acceptance, despite challenging conventional thinking, for just one reason: they passed their experimental tests. Proponents of metaphysics and spirituality are far less open to revising or expanding their worldviews to encompass new discoveries. Rather than welcoming new truths, they often cling to ancient ideas, explanations, and texts. If on occasion they turn to science in an attempt to justify their traditional ideas, whenever it appears that science does not support them they are quick to turn their backs on it. And when they do employ scientific concepts, they use them so loosely that the meanings are altered, with the result that the conclusions they come to are not valid.

             One can’t expect science to answer all the questions of the universe. There may well be secrets of nature that will remain forever beyond the outer limits of human intelligence. Other questions, such as those regarding human aspirations and the meaning of our lives, are best viewed from multiple perspectives, both scientific and spiritual. These approaches can coexist and respect each other. The trouble arises when mystical and spiritual doctrine makes pronouncements about the physical universe that contradict what we actually observe to be true.

                Science can answer the seemingly intractable question of how the universe came into being, and there is reason to believe that science will eventually be able to explain the origins of consciousness, too. Science is an ever-advancing process, and the end is not in sight. If at some future date we are able to explain the mind in terms of the activity of a universe of neurons, if all our mental processes do prove to have their source in the flow of charged ions within nerve cells, that would not mean that science denies the worth of “love, trust, beauty, awe, wonder, compassion, truth, the arts, morality, and the mind itself.” To explain something is not, as I have said, to diminish or deny its worth. It is also important to recognize that even if we consider a scientific explanation of our thought processes (or anything else) aesthetically or spiritually unsatisfying or unpalatable, that does not make it false. Our explanations must be guided by truth; truth cannot be adjusted to conform to what we want to hear.

             The answers of science don’t come easily. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg has dedicated his life to the tireless study of the theory of elementary particles, such as the electron, the muon, and the quark. Yet he wrote that he has never found those particles very interesting. Why then has he devoted his life to understanding them? Because he believes that at this moment in the history of human thought, their study offers the most promising way to achieve insight into the fundamental laws that govern all of nature. Some of the ten thousand scientists who worked, many for over a decade, to build the Large Hadron Collider, the multibillion-dollar particle accelerator in Geneva, probably didn’t think the long hours of calibrating delicate instruments and fine-tuning spectrometers was all that fascinating either (though many certainly did!). They did it for the same reason Weinberg studied muons. Humans are unlike other animals in the questions they ask about their environment. When dropped into new surroundings, a rat will explore for a while, form a mental map, get safe, then stop probing. But a person will ask, Why am I in this cage? How did I get here ?  Where’s the nearest decent coffee ? Humans study science because we have an urge to know how our lives fit into the greater scheme of the universe. That’s one of the defining qualities of what makes us human. But the answers are only edifying if they are true. So to you, the reader, I would suggest that, you keep in mind the words of the iconic Caltech physicist Richard Feynman: the first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest to fool.”