Campus Bathroom - WTF?

2009-11-14T16:26:00.000-08:00

Science: Absolute Fact?

2009-11-09T18:36:00.001-08:00

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once wrote: "It is important to realize that in modern physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is." This idea of our very limited knowledge of everything is universally true. In fact, if we knew everything, further scientific study would no longer be needed.

Science teaches us about Laws of Thermodynamics, Newton's Laws, and other scientific laws. But are these really "Laws"? Or are they just fundamental assumptions based on observation, experiments, and common sense?

Just because we know the thermodynamics, kinetics, and 'all' the steps of a chemical reaction, can we say for certainty that we know everything about that particular reaction? Does electron transfer between molecules takes place as simplistic way as we learned in Organic Chemistry? Are Newton's laws valid for all physical systems under any condition?

Newton's famous phrase 'Hypotheses non fingo' translates to: "I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction."

The truth is that human knowledge of the natural world is very limited. We have very little intuition about even the most common scientific concepts (e.g. what the heck is entropy? [entropy = disorder or any other available definitions are very vague and incomplete]).

What science then does is make very good assumptions which are extremely accurate in predicting behavior of a system with variable range of validity. Some of these assumptions then become scientific 'laws' since they seem to be inarguable by any other theory and prove to be valid for a wide range of systems.

My point for this blog is that although science provides the means to understand a lot of things, it's not set in stone. Understanding science behind something is not enough to say you understand everything about that particular system. And however good science becomes in the future, we will never be able to understand, well, anything, completely. I'm not saying that don't study science anymore. Results of scientific discoveries have undeniably been EXTREMELY helpful making life in this world better and I'm an engineer myself making use of scientific discoveries to meet the need of a more technologically advanced society. All I'm saying is that just don't rely solely on science to make yourself look like you know everything and make claims such as "God is Dead" (This would require me to write another blog. May be some day when I'm feeling like writing and I have read more Nietzche. For now I'll conclude here) so fast because science can't explain everything, just makes very good assumptions.

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Campus Bathroom - WTF?

Science: Absolute Fact?