Natural science has been evolving side by side with the society of mankind. Invention of wheel ,cognition of day and night, stumbling upon roots and herbs while fighting with diseases ,lever and pulley, bow and arrow and if we take the timeline forward over the graph of history then telescope, computer, genetic theory, theory of relativity etc are some of the milestones on the path of progress of natural science.
Are there indeed, definite laws of motion of this progress or development? As natural science studies different layers of nature, can we study natural science itself likewise? How should we embark on this study? Should we proceed by adding the discoveries in natural science linearly one upon the other ,and gauge the development of natural science from their fundamentals and their definitions?
The formula E=mc2 tells nothing about Einstein and his life dedicated to the altar of science. Neither this formula reveals the labour that went under developing the theory and the debates that its origin gave birth to . In academic texts we study Einstein’s theory of relativity juxtaposed with Galileo’s theory of relativity. The influence of time i.e. historicity is absent in academic debates . Any study or survey done in science sans historicity will be nothing but ,superficial because beneath these discourses lie suppressed the life of all the men and women and their debates who have contributed to the development of natural science. The progress of the development engenders an extremely tortuous path. Deliberating upon this complex motion forces us to delve into the lives of those who gave natural science its present identity, or in other words lives of these people themselves can be seen as the milestones in the journey of natural science, people who dedicated their lives in the pursuit of these theories or discoveries. Natural science is brimming with a superabundance of human brilliance .
One could even map the lives of Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, Dawkins and others and the debates they took part into, and it would portray the growth of natural science on the canvas of history. We do have advanced one step forward. But if instead of projecting the discoveries and inventions of science on a linear trajectory, we lay bare the lives of the scientists behind these discoveries and inventions and put the contradictions of their lives, would it be a better portrayal of the development of science? One crucial fact that emerges out is this progress is effected by human genius which at times even outpacing the march of time transcended the prevailing problems of the day. Certainly human genius is a prime factor behind the progress of science, but not the sole factor. Everyone’s life is bracketed with his/her space and time. This portrayal would be mainly the portrayal of his personality, portrayal of his genius ,which would also be suffused with all the colour of life.
The voyage of exploration of Darwin, Galileo spending the major portion of his life in gazing into the skies, Archimedes running through the streers in gay abandon crying eureka–eureka, Taketani disentangling the formulae of quantum physics while remaining incarcerated in the prisons under absolute dictatorship: well high like this natural science sawled through in its voyage of progress. Challenging each and every prevailing point of view these scientist each ensconced in his own time and space gave the world a new way of looking at it. The voyage of Darwin that enabled man to Isaac himself, Einstein while apparently twiddling his pen between his fingers, was sketching the world within the equations he wrote ,and getting them validated in his Gedanken experiments ( thought experiments).
While Vladmir Fock, Dirac, Blokhinstev, Darwin, Feynmann, Stephen J. Gould were doing there experiments from the lanes and by lanes of research institution and universities, Galileo did them from castles, Servetus in graveyards, and our primitive scientists in the forests. But the theories, the concepts that could see the light of the day during their lifetimes, could be conceived in those days only. Because they were the needs of the day. The primitive scientists dwelling in the forests in their primitives communes could no way discover the theory of relativity .But it was the historically accumulated knowledge gained by them and the generation of scientists who came after them and based on these Einstein was able to formulate his theory of relativity. Just how this knowledge about nature and of man as a part of nature gets accumulated ,and went on getting augmented through generations after generations? This was not just a mechanical accumulation, but every new concept, every new theory negated the old concepts partly or in their entirety ,and this negation of negation is the way it goes till date. A new idea accepts the positives of other ideas and rejects their negativities; and this dialectics of the origin of any new concept. Through this process of negation of negation any new concept is born in actuallity . This new concept does not stand in opposition to some old one, rather it comes out through the contradictions of opposite concepts.
Right from the mythical imagination of universe of the primitive man to the Greek theory that considered that cosmos (the large scale order of the universe) originated from chaos and from protonebular theory to big bangtheory and big bounce to the theory of multiverse ,all of them advanced by negating and at the same time by sublating the others.
If we ponder over any specific point of time we see that in science there have always been several hypotheses and theories struggling with each other and whichever hypothesis succeeds to become a theory negates and sublates the remaining hypotheses. The evolution of theory of evolution negating the theory of intelligent design is a pertinent examples. But same thing can be seen in almost every realm of science it can be the atomic theory as developed by Dalton, Rutherford and Bohr culminating into the development of the principles of Schrödinger and Heisenberg or it may be the triumphant theory of relativity advancing by casting aside the Ether - theory. That is if we are to gauge the evolution of science , then we should not limit ourselves in appreciating the works of those scientists who took natural science ahead, rather we have to underline the significance of those scientists as well by don’t of whose incorrect or partially incorrect hypothesis science has travelled thus far. Now we have around at the turn from where we can ask what are the factors behind the evolution of science?
...Continued in 2nd part
댓글