 | | | |
| |||
| It is such considerations that lead me to believe that the pursuit of the fundamental social sciences can eventually provide the raw material for social inventions that will significantly reduce our currently paralyzing fears of what people can do to other people by 'pushing the button,' by local and world-wide lawlessness, or by the coercive nature of police and militarily dominated governments. There are many important sentimental fruits of science, two of which I would like to touch on before closing: the unity of nature and the meaning of heresy. One of the most elegant and satisfying achievements of science is the discovery of widespread unity in nature. For example, every atom of carbon in each galaxy, in each star, has the same properties and emits exactly the same color of light as does our earthly carbon. The diverse phenomena of nature do not require the assumption of diverse forces or causes. Electricity and magnetism are coupled, and together they explain the existence of radio waves, light, and X-rays. The aurora borealis is not very different in origin from the light given off by a TV screen. Lightning is equivalent to the shock to your fingertip when you touch a doorknob after shuffling across a rug on a dry winter day. The list of phenomena that can be explained by virtue of electromagnetic forces is almost endless. But there are still many gaps. Gravity and electromagnetism continue to defy unification despite the many attempts by Einstein and others to do so. But there has been progress in other directions: nuclear radioactivity and electromagnetism, it appears, are the result of the same underlying forces, the electro-weak force. Our detailed awareness of the overall unity seems to be expanding. As more and more is discovered about nature, more and more of it fits together. This unity is a sentimental fruit of science more than it is an immediately practical one. It removes for us any sense of frivolous arbitrariness about the behavior of nature. This quest for unity, this reduction of the number of | different kinds of explanations or causes that are needed in order to account for observed diversity, started a long time ago - perhaps with the atomic postulates about matter conceived by Democritus and the Greeks. A contrary trend is manifest in so-called 'pseudoscience.' I have heard people claim that if they were in Fresno and had bad thoughts about the plants in their home in San Francisco, the plants would be wilted when they returned home. Such behavior on the part of the plants belies everything that I know about long-range action at a distance. No matter how often the experiment was repeated, I would not believe that there was any cause-and-effect relationship between the bad thoughts and the wilted plants. At the Exploratorium we have tried to express this unity in two ways. We have set up the exhibits in sections'Electricity, Light, Animal Behavior, etc.'with each section showing multiple examples of a particular kind of behavior. But there are no walls between these sections. And exhibits on reflection, for example, occur in the Light, the Sound, and the Resonance sections. In addition to our exhibits, our quarterly magazine, The Exploratorium, promotes the idea of unity. Each issue is about a single topic treated from several different points of view. The issue on bicycles, for example, had articles about their construction, their stability, their history and social impact, the most modem improvements and efficiency, etc. I believe that most of the science magazines do a disservice to the cause of science by including in each issue a hodge-podge of unrelated topics in the hope that they will attract more readers. In doing so they belie the important sense of unity that science can bring to all of us. The simplification of our view of the world that comes with understanding how things fit together may be one of the most important emotional and sentimental fruits of science. The other sentimental fruit of science that I want to touch on briefly is a change in our view | ||