There’s more left of Science

Discoveries are determined pursuits of truth. Scientists have acted as messengers to and from the unknown. Homo sapiens will never stop seeking to find out what they doesn’t know. The story of scientists’ success suggests that it continues to inspire many fields today. Difficult questions remain of course; but, science can offer at least answers, solutions and progress. History of science points that nothing is straightforward. No insight has gone unchallenged and the scientific and ethical don’t run on parallel lines. An arsenal of arguments is available for scientists from which they extract their approach to science.

A science writer at Scientific American, John Horgan believes that science is drawing to a close: Science, right now, is a victim of its own success. He feels that the map of reality is already out there and narratives of biology and other sciences just fill in these gaps. All those marvelous discoveries that shook the world needn’t be repeated in the future. This unfounded optimism is tempered by the former editor of Nature Sir John Maddox. He feels that science survives on speculations strengthened by stunning theories. And nonetheless we are asking the same questions that puzzled Aristotle then but are probed with more preciseness.

There are no final answers to final questions. Science is a process of successive approximations to truth. Whether the truth is absolute or not is an open question. John Maynard Smith smacks at the end of science: oddly…there are too many answers and we are not sure which of them is right. There may be more than one reason or probably is.

Scientists seek truth through knowledge and progress comes through success in this exciting enterprise. We are told that the universe came into existence about 15 billion years ago with Big Bang. On our earth, for most of the 4000 million years it has been in existence, there was no living creature or thing. If we equate the age of earth to a 24hour day, the first signs of life appear after the 23^rd hour and humans emerge in the last few minutes after midnight. This analogy of the clock is often used but it is fatally pessimistic. For when the midnight strikes, it is not Apocalypse: the end of everything. Our last few minutes can be the first steps into another 15 billion year adventure.