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    Whither Science? Three Essays
    Whither Science? Three Essays
    Whither Science? Three Essays
    Ebook81 pages1 hour

    Whither Science? Three Essays

    By Danko Antolovic

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    About this ebook

    In this collection of essays we explore some basic questions facing science today. Modern science has become a truly global endeavor, which influences all of contemporary life, and like other great human endeavors, science has its own historical origins and intellectual foundations. It has a set of accepted principles, as well as actual practices that do not always follow the professed principles, and it has choices to make for the future. We look into the fundamental questions about the purposes, practices and future of science because we believe that both scientists and the broader public ‒ that is, all of us who benefit from science ‒ should be mindful of the social, historical and material consequences of science’s ubiquitous presence.

    This book is written in non-technical language, and we intend it to be easily accessible to general readers who are interested in science and its broader implications. It will also be of interest to scientists who seek to explore the intellectual context of their discipline. No specialized technical knowledge is necessary to follow the book, and some scientific subjects that may not be readily familiar are briefly explained along the way. We make a few references to historical writings, and we encourage interested readers to pursue them further, but they are not essential for the understanding of these essays.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDanko Antolovic
    Release dateFeb 21, 2015
    ISBN9781311890573
    Whither Science? Three Essays
    Author

    Danko Antolovic

    Danko Antolovic is a scientist and technologist whose professional activities and publications include research in quantum chemistry and computational modelling of molecules, research in solar energy for space applications, design of systems for image analysis and robotic vision, and development of wireless communication technology. He is the author, most recently, of the monograph “Radiolocation in Ubiquitous Wireless Communication” (Springer, 2010), and of two novellas: "My Name is Daedalus" (Straylight Magazine, November 2016) and "Woman from Colchis" (Scarlet Leaf Review, October 2018).

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      Book preview

      Whither Science? Three Essays - Danko Antolovic

      Whither Science?

      Three Essays

      By Danko Antolovic

      Copyright 2014 Danko Antolovic. All rights reserved.

      Smashwords Edition.

      Cover design by H.O. Charles.

      In memory of Dubravka Janda,

      teacher and friend.

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Science: its Past and Present

      Science and Speculative Thought

      The Next Big Question

      About the Author

      Preface

      Contemporary science is everywhere: there is unlikely a human being alive today who is not touched by science and its consequences in some way, for good or for ill. Some idolize it, some mistrust it; some struggle at its esoteric frontiers, while others accept its fruits without second thought, as if science were a modern horn of plenty. Natural science is enmeshed in every part of modern life, and it has been invoked, hailed and cursed in every context, from public policy to religious belief.

      Yet science is a human activity, like others. It is something that we humans do, and we bring both our genius and our failings to the task: we invoke the lofty ideals of our calling, but we also do what it takes to get ahead. We shine the light of our reason into nature’s hidden corners, and we do not often ask why we trust that light, or whether we should trust it. And we are creatures of the moment: in the excitement of the present, we seldom foresee future consequences, and our future is the recognition and correction of our past errors.

      In these essays, I have attempted to analyze the nature of scientific enterprise as a contemporary social undertaking; I have asked what world view follows from its accepted intellectual assumptions; and I have asked what its future direction should be, given its past and present. Such accounting should be demanded of any human endeavor to which history has given the mark of permanence, and there is no doubt that natural science bears that mark. Whatever the manner in which science touches your life, I hope that you will find in this work something that is either inspiring or worthy of thoughtful disagreement.

      D.A.

      Science: its Past and Present

      The Age of Heroes

      Foundational stories of the origins of peoples and cultures always exalt the past in order to validate the present, but we know that the here-and-now never quite measures up to the grand mythical past from which it supposedly descended. Heroic bygone days always give way to a mundane present, and not even the greatest historic rulers of ancient Greece had quite the stature of the legendary kings of the house of Atreus, or of Achilles and Odysseus, Homeric heroes of divine lineage. The latter heroes, for all their courage and wile, were in turn not the equals of their predecessors, the mythical gods who, in the beginning, shaped the world in blood-drenched acts of creation.

      Our contemporary techno-scientific culture, which is close to being the global culture, has no foundational myth written in a great epic and chanted down the generations, but it does have a popularly accepted foundational narrative, which is retold in countless books on popular science, and which aims to explain science’s origins and validate its purpose. In this essay, we will briefly relate this narrative, and we will examine its transition into present-day science, a contemporary human endeavor for which the narrative still functions as the story of origin.

      At the risk of being somewhat Eurocentric, by science we mean a systematic and uncompromising application of rational empirical inquiry to the material world. Of course, empirical inquiry is as old as the human kind, but its transformation into a fundamental outlook on the world, that is into science, took place in the 16th and 17th century Europe. Men who stand as symbols of that awakening are mainly the early astronomers: Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei; in popular imagination they live on as Promethean figures who defied authority and brought the gift of light to humanity, and some of them, like Prometheus himself, did so at great personal cost.

      European Enlightenment of the 17-18th century, and the Industrial Revolution, stretching through 19th century, is the Age of Heroes of classical science. This is the time of larger than life figures, fathers of scientific fields: Newton (mechanics and calculus), Boyle and Lavoisier (chemistry), Kelvin (thermodynamics), Darwin (evolution), Faraday (electromagnetism); mathematicians Leibniz, Euler and Gauss also belong here. And so on: our purpose is not to produce a full list of credits, but to sketch out the popular narrative, incomplete as it inevitably is. The later part of that period, the 18th and 19th century, could also be called more prosaically the Age of Progress: many of the scientific names and discoveries from that time enjoy little popular recognition, but that was the period in which the breakthroughs of the heroic age matured into a way of life and formed the foundations for today’s technology-based society.

      Early 20th century saw another, late heroic period, belonging to atomic physics and the theory of relativity; in popular imagination, this period in science’s history is represented by the slightly idiosyncratic visage of Albert Einstein, and by the mushroom cloud. The foundational narrative of science, as we outline it here, ends with the Second World War and the development of the atom bomb. This is the time when heroic ages come to a close, and science comes under the sway of earthly rulers, of history, and of politics.

      Now, it is certainly true that scientific progress provided useful help to state power well before the atom bomb, and in any case heroic ages are always more allegorical than factual. But the development of the nuclear weapon is a historical marker of the changed status of science in society, since the magnitude of the bomb’s power made it clear that the very survival of nation states would depend on the national prowess

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