| | Groping toward Understanding | Man, from the earliest dawning of his mind in the remote past, has doubtless struggled to understand his position in the hierarchy of nature. He has strived continuously to learn his relationships to the Universe about him, a Universe over which he felt he had little or no control, and which he felt, intuitively, exerted an inexorable control over him. The most inaccessible and seemingly inevitable of these were the movements of sun, moon, and other celestial bodies. Their dependable presence and movements he could relate to the day and night, the ocean tides, and the seasons. In searching for security and understanding it was only natural that man turned to the seemingly all-powerful, permanent, and dependable heavens. But lacking a means of really knowing anything he invented relations that served to provide him with confidence, whether justifiably or not. For man, there exists a deep-seated need for beliefs. How many among us remain completely unmindful of one or another of the innumerable popular superstitions or do not secretly entertain lucky numbers or good-luck charms of one kind or other? For modern civilized man "science" has largely replaced superstitions. He looks importantly to "science" for the solutions of all his problems as he once looked to the heavens and his gods. But "science" based upon rationalized "truths" derived from increasingly accurate observations of nature and often retestable by obtaining predictable results from controlled, experimentally manipulated conditions is not entirely unlike the superstitions it replaces, in that its "truths" are uncertain "shifting sands." The "truths" of one generation may become absurdities of a succeeding one. Our treatises in science demand steady revisions, not simply to add the new "truths," but almost equally to shed that which has meanwhile ceased to be "true." The history of mankind has been a steady, continuous groping toward understanding the actual "nature of things." At every step of the way there have occurred some "truths" more durable and some less so. ... Since even the "truths" of modern science may become very different over the brief span of a few years, it is to be expected that over hundreds or thousands of years of history they would undergo far more tremendous changes. Small wonder man continues to grope beyond his current science, even as scientists steadily do themselves, both as human beings and as scientists. | — Michel Gauquelin, The Cosmic Clocks - From Astrology to a Modern Science | Indexes/03 |
1 comments:
We have a scientific papers steadily revised demand, rather than simply adding a new "truth" is the same almost the same time, however, these are no longer "true."
Post a Comment