Have Faith in Science?

The Church indicted Galileo for believing that the earth was not at the center of the universe. Well he was not all right in saying that the sun was, though, but he had a point. His point, philosophically, was that Man should never deny what he believes is truth. Now this is misleading, as anyone is free to believe what he wishes. I wish to believe that I was in Albert Einstein’s shoes, but that is not to be. To interpret his philosophy, we should understand that belief cannot be a whim. A belief is always to be acquired via a thought process of reason.

The church, however, did not cater to reason and its allies. It derived its power from mass control. Anything radical was a threat. So his thesis was summarily rejected giving a sole reason. His conclusions were not in harmony with the Holy Bible. Seems very, very, irrational on part of the church, doesn’t it?

I believe science is a branch of philosophy. I believe this because both are based on inferences drawn on rational premises. There is but, a difference between science and philosophy. Though both deal with finding out the truth on the basic level, science is called science because it needs experimental or observational proof for a theory. A scientific theory is a successful one if it has a large number of experimental or observational statistics in its support. Now, there’s this very popular theory, String Theory, which blows your mind away. And scientists have been working on it religiously. But sadly enough, if we define science as study based on results of experiments, or conclusions based on observations, we can make no further progress by its definition itself as for further progress we need some other sense (other than the five senses given to us) to observe the implications of string theory. Because String theory makes predictions like 11 dimensions. Now our minds are designed for the three dimensional world. We can see height, we can see length, we can see width. We know a fourth dimension, time. But how are we sensing it? Sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. None of these senses can sense time. How do we sense it then? We sense time as a clock ticks, i.e. we sense time by motion of anything through the three dimensions. So we can hope someday we could sense the extra dimensions in a similar manner.

But here we are getting off the topic. What was the topic in the first place? Yeah, that science is a branch of philosophy. But over the years, scientists drifted away from philosophers because they adhered to a different approach. Scientists got gradually more and more interested in the outcomes of experiments pertaining to their ideas. They had original ideas and by far have been the best of those ever had by the human race, but they developed a frantic need to prove that their ideas were correct, and in fact it was a good thing. Because for example, before Galileo, it was a widely accepted fact that the earth pulls the more massive objects with a greater force and hence the heavier the object, the faster it would fall (Aristotle’s theory). Now it could have been proved wrong by a thought process alone but it took Galileo’s experiment to prove that Aristotle had been wrong. I’m trying to make a point that may be experimental proof is not after all completely necessary to accept a theory. Experimental facts are required because we do not totally understand what is happening. We observe nature, propose a theory as to the happening, and then we test it against experiment. If it passes the test a large number of times, the theory is accepted until it fails in some exceptional cases and then we modify the theory to accommodate the exceptional case. That’s how science works. It’s the same like knowing the answer to a mathematical problem, because the guy sitting adjacent to you in the examination hall has whispered to you the answer, but obviously he cannot whisper all the steps to you. Then you try and fudge 3-4 steps in between and underline the final answer two times and hope that seeing that the answer is right, the examiner won’t bother to look into the steps by which you arrived at the answer.

Again, off topic. But it’s kind of difficult to stick just to the topic. Anyways, so I was saying that what Galileo had to prove by experiment, could have been easily shown without actually performing an experiment. Let us see how. Suppose there is a 1 kg block which falls at a given rate g. Then, according to Aristotle, a 2 kg block would fall at a rate 2g. Now if we take two 1 kg blocks and drop them they would both fall at the rate g individually. Now suppose, we tie up two 1 kg blocks together, then again according to Aristotle, the combination would fall at a rate 2g. The only difference between the two events is that the two 1 kg blocks are tied together in one and are independent in the other. How does the earth “come to know” of this difference and act with different amount of force in each case? So it seems actually performing an experiment was not necessary. Just the thought process was enough to prove that Galileo was right.

Coming back to the String theory, which all the theoretical physicists boast of as being a potential theory of the universe, is not in its essence a theory of science. It cannot be proved right because neither do we have the apparatus to carry out such experiments, nor have we the senses required to observe its implications. And for the same reasons it can never be proved wrong. It’s just a proposal, just a guess which seems so promising, because all the other theories of science have stopped to suffice. Perhaps what we have been taught since childhood has a different, much simpler expression in some other world whose inhabitants have completely different senses than us. Perhaps, the whole notion of discovering the laws of nature by science (as it is known), has become obsolete. The physicists are, unconsciously, embracing faith.