Science Gets Older, Too
It’s amazing how much your view of science changes over the years. Not as you get older, but as you progress through the strata of knowledge and academia, up the slopes of the Mountains of Knowledge.
It starts off, well, before you can really remember, when it first occurred to you to ask questions about what was really going on. You were five and you wondered why there was light when you pressed the switch, where the water came from when you turned the tap, and that old chestnut, why the sky was blue. And science was there with the answers. Why, it’s because of electricity, of course. Or water pressure. Or refraction in the atmosphere. All very straightforward.
Science was presented as a kind of simplistic gospel in primary-coloured pictures and simple block diagrams in the patronizing textbooks we make children read sometimes. The sort of things with pictures of cows and lorries and arrows showing you that this is an udder and that is a tyre. The sort of authoritative, comforting exposition that let your five-year-old mind know that everything was reassuringly understood by someone, probably whoever wrote the book.
And then you got a bit older and realised that there were different types of science, that things branched off into physics and biology and chemistry and they were all different and separable. At about the same time you began to realise the inconsistencies. They told you once that there were only three states of matter- and then you read somewhere that there’s also something called plasma which happens when you heat gas up even more. What? Why did they tell you there were only three?
Or your realise that that Big Bang thing which is of course where we all came from is actually a Theory. No one was there to see it. We’re not absolutely sure. We sill have to work out a lot of the details.
Or you come across a page of advanced maths with symbols the likes of which you have never seen (you’ve got to the level of maybe simultaneous equations or plotting things on graphs at this point). It looks somewhere between 3x+4 and the Dwarven runes from the back of the hobbit, and you slowly realise that there is a hell of a lot more going on than anyone ever told you.
They said everything was made of atoms and they were absolutely indivisible. …Oh no they’re not! You can cut them up with gigaelectronvolts and there’s even more going on inside!
But still it’s a sort of gospel. You can learn from the textbooks and the documentaries but it’s always you who’s doing the learning; it’s still a process of discovery.
And then a few more years pass and suddenly you’re reading Nature or the Communications of the ACM (probably because they made you read it, or you need to reference something) and you realise that the stuff you’re reading has never, ever been thought of before. You’ve managed somehow to make it up past the tree line, into the cold rarefied air where everything is new and no one is sure of anything. It doesn’t stop at plasma. It goes on all the way up to the Bose-Einstein condensate, cowboy.
This is the front line, the coal face, the stratosphere. The papers you are reading, though peer reviewed and edited and checked, represent ideas that no mind has ever held, experiments that have never been done before, cunning techniques that no one has ever applied. You realise, as well as how much we have understood so far, how much we have yet to do.
But still you are just reading papers. The violent new ideas and the intricate, twisted theories belong to other people, and you are only learning them. What about the next level? How much further do you have to go before you can come up with theories of your own instead of just absorbing them? What vast amount of cunning do you need to think what has not been thought before?
Then you realise how incomprehensibly enormous science actually is. Long gone are the days where one man could know nearly everything about physics or chemistry. It’s difficult now to know everything about one tiny subfield of a specialisation of a discipline of physics. Read the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; the first 5 words are comprehensible. The rest takes off in such an intricate edifice of superhuman mathematics that it is difficult to believe that one man could comprehend all of it.* How must it feel to look down on the world if you understand that much?
And how can we live in a world where there is so much to be known about every substance, every phenomenon, every interaction- that we will never know? Oh, someone somewhere might understand it. But you will never get it all.
Come for a walk in the Mountains of Knowledge. But make sure you wear your highway shoes.
* “An elliptic curve over Q is said to be modular if it has a finite covering by a modular curve of the form X0(N). Any such elliptic curve has the property that its Hasse-Weil zeta function has an analytic continuation and satisfies a functional equation of the standard type.”
