Books by Ian Rogers
Books by Ian Rogers
Science is necessarily incomplete. We don’t know everything - but we hope to know more. There are two areas that we explore. First, and most obvious, we are aware of the boundaries of our knowledge. What happens inside a black hole? What is dark energy? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? We talk of ‘pushing out the boundaries’ of our knowledge. This is like a short-sighted beetle , walking about in a cullender and peering over the edge. Just what is out there?
Secondly, science examines, or is sometimes forced by other knowledge to examine, what we think we already know. Whatever happened to ‘phlogiston’? More recently, it used to be dogma that the brain, once structurally formed, was fixed. It was a hard-wired computer into which all sorts of programs and data could be poured. We now know that the brain is ‘plastic’. Experiences actually change the microstructure of the brain. We can even change (or reprogram) our own brains to a degree, hence neuro-linguistic programming and ‘the power of positive thinking’. We are not who we were a few moments ago! Discovering new things about what we thought we knew is a bit like our beetle, walking about in the cullender, suddenly noticing the holes in the structure and peering down through a hole. Oh dear! This atom isn’t really a small, hard, indivisible ball It can be broken up!
None of the above means that science is overall wrong , nor that it’s useless. A cullender is a useful object. We just need to be aware that we live on a porous surface with a ragged outer edge (perhaps the dog chewed it). We like safety and certainty in our lives and tend to ignore the uncertainties but we are safe even with the uncertainties. The holes are too small for the beetle to fall through and it has more sense than to throw itself off the edge.
P.S. For purists among you, ‘cullender’, according to Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, is an acceptable variant of ‘colander’.
<< Next Archive Previous >>