Impetus for Science

Impetus for Science

If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do. There would be nothing to figure out. There would be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world, where things changed in random or very complex ways, we would not be able to figure things out. Again, there would be no such thing as science.

But we live in an in-between universe, where things change, but according to patterns, rules, or, as we call them, laws of nature. If I throw a stick up in the air, it always falls down. If the sun sets in the west, it always rises again the next morning in the east. And so it becomes possible to figure things out. We can do science, and with it we can improve our lives.

In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability.

A Distant Galaxy. There was a time before television, before motion pictures, before Internet, before radio, before books. The greatest part of human existence was spent in such a time. Over the dying embers of a campfire, on a moonless night, we watched the stars. Image : Distant Galaxy by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Human beings are good at understanding the world. “We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens… The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the reassures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment (Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographucum).

Science Never Ends

Because science is inseparable from the rest of the human endeavor, it cannot be discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head-on, with a number of social, religious, political and philosophical issues.

Science is ongoing process and it never ends. In fact, there is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. Truly enough, because this is so, our world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation. These millions of humans, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in findings and methods of science.

Every year we uncover a host of wonders concerning the Universe, its intricate composition and its swarm of stars and planets.

Science never ends. Glow. Illustration: © Elena

Holland

In a typical year many ships set sail halfway around the world. Down the west coast of Africa, through what they called the Ethiopian Sea, around the south coast of Africa, within the Straits of Madagascar, and on past the southern tip of India they sailed, to one major focus of their interests, the Spice Islands, present day Indonesia. Some expeditions journeyed from there to a land named New Holland, and today called Australia. A few ventured through the straits of Malacca, past the Philippines, to China.

Never before or since then has Holland been the world power it was then. A small country, forced to live by its wits, its foreign policy contained a strong pacifist element. Because of its tolerance for unorthodox opinions, it was a haven for intellectuals who were refugee from censorship and thought control elsewhere in Europe – much as the United Stated benefited enormously in the 1930ies by the exodus of intellectuals from the Nazi-dominated Europe.

We know from a mid-century account of an “Embassy from the East-India Company of the United provinces of the Netherlands, to the Grand Tartar, Cham, Emperor of China”. We even know what gifts they brought the Court. The Empress was presented witj “six little chests of divers pictures” and the Emperor received “two fardels of cinnamon”.

The Dutch burgers, ambassadors and sea captains stood wide-eyed in amazement, face to face with another civilisation in the Imperial City of Peking.

Un cartographe hollandais.Beautiful. There are many things in the heavens that have not been seen before our own age. Image: in public domain

Holland and Science

Seventeenth century Holland was the home of the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza, whom Einstein admired; of Descartes, a pivotal figure in the history of mathematics and philosophy; and of John Locke, a political scientist who influenced a group of philosophically inclined revolutionaries named Paine, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson. Never before or since has Holland been graced by such a galaxy of artists and scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. This was the time of the master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer and Frans Halls; of Leeuwenghoek, the inventor of the microscope; of Grotius, the founder of international law, of Willerbrord Shellius, who discovered the law of the refraction of light.

In the Dutch tradition of encouraging freedom of thought, the University of Leiden offered a professorship to an Italian scientist named Galileo, who had been forced by the Catholic Church under threat of torture to recant his heretical view that the Earth moved about the Sun and not vice-versa (In 1979, Pope John Paul II cautiously proposed reversing the condemnation of Galileo done 346 years earlier by the Holy Inquisition). Galileo had close ties with Holland, and his first astronomical telescope was an improvement of a spyglass of Dutch design. With it he discovered sunspots, the phases of Venus, the craters on the Moon and the four large moons of Jupiter now called, after him, the Galilean satellites. Galileo’s own description of his ecclesiastical travails is contained in a letter he wrote in the year 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina:

Some years ago, as your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that have not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors (many of them ecclesiastics) – as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment and growth of the arts.