Tag Archive: science

Science as the new God

Posted by Ankit On January 27th, 2015

There are many good things one can say about the effects of a century of science on life in general, including a better standard of living on average, longer lifespans, perhaps even peace between nations. However, there is one aspect of it againstÂ which reasonable arguments can be made. The scientific attitude is supposed to be one of deep skepticism and relentless doubt but science itself has inculcated in the general masses, curiously enough, an utter morbidity of thought, a complete surrender of skepticism. It has ushered in a whole generation which celebrates everything it associates with science with the exact same devotion as is expected of a religious person. ScienceÂ has silenced debate even in areas where its gripÂ isÂ still too weak and its mad worship has completely undermined such fruitful activities as the liberal arts. It has made the idea of a well rounded human being who can think on his own and argue, a total anachronism. With its reductionist tendencies, science has created what are essentially robots who seem to think in similarly fragmented, hyper-specialized, broken ways and who are only too eager to appeal to borrowed arguments from authority. The result is a population which seems to have lost its sense of all that is human in this world, the grayness of issues, the lack of clear blacks and whites, the idea that we still live in a world where, when all is said and done and strictly speaking, nothing can be provenÂ as a surety and which is why it is still of use to learn from diverse sources.

I think the idea that there either already exists some scientific explanation to ourÂ question or that there will be one one day is a dangerous one because it allows us to shift the responsibility of thinking about it to someone else and to some other time. We are, once again, throwing our lot and our hopes withÂ an external authority. We have done it time and time again with different godsÂ but this time theÂ God is Science.Â It's the latest agency to say to us, believe in me, I'm right. At this point I want to clarify that I have the utmost respect for the true scientific attitude. My problem is with howÂ science is seen in the current society, as the last word in all matters, as something worth groveling against. And this is not an accident but the unintended consequenceÂ of the narrow-minded and idiotic efforts of such scientists as Dawkins.

Science as a belief

Posted by Ankit On April 26th, 2010

It's interesting how much one doesn't know of oneself until he is asked specifically and has to think about it. So the other day Khatri bhaiyya asked me why I get so flustered whenever the topic of homeopathy comes up. As it turns out, I really do get irritated but if he had not mentioned it I would never have admitted it to myself. Then I had another discussion with Jackie upon something similar and the upshot of it all is that some little things became a bit less vague.

I suppose that of all things that irritate me, the one that does it to the greatest extent is the statement, 'well, science is just another belief.' Frequently it is uttered by someone who has just had a long and winded argument and has decided to settle it all by pointing to the shaky grounds upon which we have built all are architectures. The thing that drives me nuts is that the statement is actually spot on. At its very heart science is actually just a belief with its own axioms and suffers from both an anthropological bias and severe sensory limitations. But it's a very special kind of belief. And it's this special nature of the belief which I find hard to convey to someone who has just made this statement. It's hard to make them understand that the important thing about science is not so much that it has 'made things work' but the fact that it's a humble, self-correcting, and ideally non-dogmatic, non-hierarchical system. A system which always stands incomplete and is never too shy to admit its own incompetence. A system where a rank outsider like Einstein can come along from nowhere and change our entire world view. It's hard to convey how important the act of 'allowing complete irreverence' to exist inside a 'belief system' is to its own well being. This one fact alone should actually be enough to warrant a qualified mention of 'science as a belief' because as I understand, everything else that humans believe in; from religion to economic doctrines to political ideas to homeopathy in fact- everything sort of assumes immunity from the wisdom of the common folk. They are all static and their leaders are unquestionable. So yes, Science at its very heart is just a belief but we should give credit where it's due. We should give credit to a system which, despite the initial appearance, is more equal and more hardworking than others. Or we might not and I should stop giving a damn.

There is another reason why I have more respect for Science than individual opinions and personal hunches. In fact, on a rational day, I have about as much respect for any belief, any morality as any other, including mine - which is not much. The reason is that they are all going to stop mattering or change once the individual ceases to exist, or the environment or circumstances change, or humanity finishes. These presumptuous thoughts don't really matter in the larger scheme of things. Laws of nature, on the other hand, transcend humanity - or so I feel. If there is another civilization somewhere else and if they are intelligent and curious about their surroundings and if they ask questions, I believe that they would find the exact same laws of nature as we have or will - but that's just pure belief and I agree...

Let there be humans...

Posted by Ankit On January 17th, 2010

I was talking to MV about evolution and he recommended a Nat-Geo documentary titled 'The human family tree' for me to watch. To anyone who is interested in knowing about the origins of us humans in a lucid and interesting way, I would also recommend this highly engrossing documentary.

I have an intense peeve against most of my teachers during my early formative years, a trait that they share with an overwhelming majority of all teachers - they were either too incompetent or too inconsiderate. The fact that they could make 'acquisition of knowledge' boring is almost too difficult for me to comprehend now. Biology, for instance, is a subject that I remember with a special hatred but I also realize that my boredom with it was more a result of how it was taught rather than what was taught. Despite all my formal education then, I have managed to save 'curiosity' from the deathly throes of uninspiring teachers. And I have lately become curious about the origins of humans and what legacy we share with other creatures on Earth. That science decodes the labyrinthine links and interlinks between all existing living organisms today with the help of genetic studies, fossil records, and radioactive dating is fascinating in itself, but I'm more thrilled by what they have found.

Mitochondrial DNA is one of only two parts (The other is Y-chromosome) of the genome which are not shuffled around by evolutionary processes. It gets passed down the generations unchanged. It is amazing that every single one of us 6.7 billions living humans has the same Mitochondrial DNA - one that they have inherited from a woman who lived in Africa about 160,000 years ago. She has been termed the 'Mitochondrial Eve' and is, in some sense, the scientific mother of all humans alive today. Her descendants, in what is termed as the Out of Africa theory, left Africa for the first time around 60,000 years ago and moved on to populate the rest of the world. Starting from Middle-East, South Asia was colonized 50,000 years ago, Australia and Europe by 40, and East Asia (Korea and Japan) by 30, and North America by 16,000 (although this last date is controversial). In their quest for territory, our direct ancestors met the already existing species from the Homo genus like the Homo Erectus and Neanderthals and did to them what we are naturally good at doing - annihilation. I find it amazing to think that most of our early literature which is religious and mythical in nature and derives inspiration from otherwise ordinary battles and natural phenomena concerns but a minuscule fraction of the total human experience. Imagine how much more rich our history and our culture would have been, if only it had the resources to tap into the thousands of stories of hardships and courage that must dot our existence during the last 200,000 years.

Then again, the last 200,000 years is nothing but a slight flutter in the larger story of evolution of life on Earth. It is often naively suggested that we have descended from monkeys. The truth is that all the living species, both animals and plants, are cousins and not one of them has descended from the other. And in this family tree, the closest cousins to us modern humans are Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and the common ancestor to all 3 of us lived about 5 million years ago in Africa. It was a bit like humans and a bit like Chimps but nowhere like monkeys (it had no tail). So our branch of the family tree joins Chimps and Bonobos at 5 million years from now. This combined branch joins Gorillas in Africa at a common ancestor who lived 7 million years ago. This branch of our common ancestor joins the common ancestors of Orangutans at about 14 million years ago in Asia! Gibbons join us about 18 million years, and it is only if we go back 25 million years ago that we find the common ancestor who gave birth to all apes including us and so called Old World monkeys like langoors and baboons.

Ancestors of other species join us as we keep going back (New World monkeys at 40 mya, Tarsiers at 58 mya, Lemurs etc. at 63 mya) and we finally reach the K-T boundary - 65 million years ago. There is a thin layer of Iridium present all across the world at a depth in the Earth's crust which corresponds to a time 65 million years in the past. While Iridium is rare in Earth, it is common in meteorites. The Chicxulub crater is a titanic impact crater - 100 miles wide and 30 miles deep - buried below the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and it has been dated at 65 mya. And the last fossils of terrestrial dinosaurs date back to 65 mya. It was only after the K-T boundary that the age of mammals began when their dinosaurial predators went extinct. It is weird to think that had that meteorite not impacted the Earth and wiped off the dinosaurs, humanity might not have had the chance to begin. On that fateful day 65 mya, all of our ancestors all across the world most probably went deaf and blind from the catastrophic impact, and were hanging in there by the skin of their teeth - all they could perhaps manage was to live long enough to reproduce - but that was enough...

If you really think about it, even 65 million years is but a small drop in the ocean of galactic time. As someone very smart once said, 'humans are what happens when you give 14 billion years to the hydrogen atom.'

Book review: Einstein

Posted by Ankit On April 19th, 2009

I recently completed Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein titled 'Einstein, His life and universe'. At 600 pages it isn't what you'd call a quickie but it's a casual read owing to the simplicity of the language. The author has been the chairman of CNN and the managing director of the Time Magazine, credentials which do not comfort your skepticism as to his ability to do justice to the life and ideas of someone as technical as Einstein. So although there were words of praise from Brian Greene (host of the brilliant NOVA documentary Elegant Universe) and Murray Gel-mann (of the quark fame), I had my doubts to begin with. And added to that was my general dislike of biographies. I have always felt that biographies are, in general, more disingenuous that autobiographies, primarily because the author of a biography is someone who is already enamoured by the subject of his writing. It is hard for him to be objective and easy to fall into the trap of idolizing the person whose biography he is attempting. In addition to this, when it comes to someone like Einstein, I personally want only to be concerned with his ideas, his philosophies, and his achievements. A good biography, on the other hand, needs to supply a lot of other information like his childhood, his affairs, his family; sadly the things I have no interest in knowing. It's a very good biography in this sense and I cannot blame it for being so.

There are some very good aspects to the book though. Anyone who is writing Einstein's biography should be ready to get down and dirty with his physics. And Mr. Isaacson shows just the resolve and he even succeeds in his effort to a large extent. I remember Feynman said once that there is a difference between knowing 'inertia' and understanding 'inertia'. And the author of this book seems to understand the physics well enough to put it all in a very coherent causal framework where you do actually get the full import of Einstein's genius story. You understand how Galileo, Newton, Poincare, Lorentz, Maxwell, Minkowski, Hilbert, Reimann, Grossman, Bohr, Shroedinger, Pauli, Rosen, Podolski and their theories fill into the larger context and how they affected Einstein's vision. And you do get a decent feel (probably about as good as popular science can provide) for his crowning achievements, the special and general relativities. But the most important part of the book is its emphasis on Einstein's imagination, as opposed to his knowledge, as being the reason for his success. One cannot understate the non-empiricism of Einstein's science. He never did science because he found an experimental reading he could not explain with the existing theories. His were always flights of imagination and childish curiosity. What would I see if I travelled alongside light matching its speed? Can a man tell the difference between gravity and matching acceleration? The book captures this subtle playfulness brilliantly.

It's definitely recommended for anyone who wants a general idea of the man and his science. It''s a very good and thorough biography, the reason why I had to skim through a lot of material. And it describes events of paramount importance in scientific history with the urgency and respect that they deserve. I would have wanted to read more about his philosophy but I guess a 'biography' is the worst place to look for it.

His last words