The Search for Solutions (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

líniV-'íí mi 1,'í The transformation of human society by science is probably only at its beginning, and nobody can guess at how it will all turn out. At the moment, the most obvious and visible effects on our lives are those resulting from the technology that derives from science, for better or worse, and much of today's public argument over whether science is good or bad is really an argument about the value of the technology, not about science. Walking around on the moon was a feat of world-class engineering, made possible by two centuries of classical physics, most of it accomplished by physicists with no faintest notion of walking on the moon. Penicillin was a form of technology made feasible by sixty years of fundamental research in bacteriology (you had to have streptococci and staphylococci in hand, and you had to know their names as well as their habits, before you could begin thinking of such things as antibiotics). Nuclear bombs, nuclear power plants, and radioisotopes for the study of human disease symbolize the range of society's choices for the application of mid-twentieth-century science, as were in their day the light bulb, the automobile, and the dial telephone. But technology is only one aspect of science, perhaps in the very long run the least important. Quite apart from the instruments it has made available for our survival, comfort, entertainment, or annihilation, science affects the way we think together. The effects on human thought tend to come at us gradually, often subtly and sometimes subconsciously. Because of new information, we change the ways in which we view the world. We are not so much the center of things anymore, because of science. We feel lost, or at least not yet found. We are not as informed about our role in the universe as we thought we were a few centuries ago, and despite our vast population we live more in loneliness and, at many times, dismay. Science is said to be the one human endeavor above all others that we should rely on for making predictions (after all, prediction is a central business of science), yet, for all the fact that we live in the Age of Science, we feel less able to foretell the future than ever before in our history. This is, to date, the most wrenching of all the transformations that science has imposed on human consciousness—in the Western world, anyway. We have learned that we do not really understand nature at all, and the more information we receive, the more strange and mystifying is the picture before us. There was a time, just a few centuries back, when it was not so. We thought then that we could comprehend almost all important matters; the earth was the centerpiece of the universe, we humans were the centerpiece of the earth, God was in his heaven just beyond what we have now identified as a narrow layer of ozone, and all was essentially right with the world; we were in full charge, for better or worse. Now, we know different, or think we do. There is no center holding anywhere, as far as we can see, and we can see great distances. What we thought to be the great laws of physics turn out to be local ordinances, subject to revision any day. Time is an imaginary space. We live in a very small spot, and for all we know there may be millions of other small spots like ours in the millions of other galaxies; in theory, the universe can sprout life any old time it feels like it, anywhere, even though the other parts of our own tiny solar system have turned out to be appallingly, depressingly dead. The near views we have had of Mars, and what we have seen of the surfaces of Jupiter and Venus, are a new cause of sadness in our culture; humans have never before seen, close up, so vast a lifelessness. It is, when you give it a thought, shocking. It is sometimes made to seem that the sciences have already come most of their allotted distance and we have learned most of what we will ever know. Lord Kelvin is reported to have concluded as much for physics, near the turn of this century, with an announcement that physics was a finished, perfected discipline with only a few odds and ends needing tidying up; soon thereafter came X rays, quantum theory, and relativity—and physics was back at the beginning again. I believe this is the true nature of science, and I can imagine no terminal point of human inquiry into nature, ever. Biology has been undergoing explosive activity during the past quarter-century; we call it the Biological Revolution because we have learned so much, so fast. But it is clear that biology is only starting up. What we perceive, so far, is order and beauty, and a kind of perfection in every reductionist detail of life, but also an increasing sense of strangeness. There is a long, long way to go before we comprehend life, and maybe we never shall. The three deepest mysteries are the evolution of the whole, coherent system of life in which we are working parts; the sorting out of cells and tissues in embryos; and our own brains. I am not sure we can ever solve the last one, for there must always be a kind of uncertainty associated with the effort to study consciousness by the