The Tree of Knowledge: The Bright and the Dark Sides of Science
Language: English
Pages: 286
ISBN: 3319014838
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Whether considered a divine gift or a Promethean conquest, science has indisputably and indelibly marked the course of human history. A product of the intellectual elite, but always nourished by the many fruits of its applications, science appears today to be a perfect system, whose laws and discoveries guide all human activities. Yet the foundations of its authority remain an open question, entailing disquieting aspects that are also to be identified in modern science. Furthermore it is seen to be exerting an increasing power over mankind. Readers are invited to follow an itinerary through the history of science, a voyage which, in the end, enables them to catch a glimpse of two divergent futures: One in which science accelerates the downfall of Homo sapiens, and another in which it helps our species to engage in a new and positive adventure, whose outcome nobody can know.
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that Euclid’s fifth postulate (of the parallels) was rejected and a new geometry was consequently developed by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachewsky (1792–1856). The language with which Lobachewsky‘s and other non-Euclidean geometries were formulated is not visually intuitive, but based on abstract mathematical entities. In the sketch on the left-hand side, a straight line and its unique parallel passing through a point P in a given plane containing the line are designated in Euclidean space. On the
What failed to appear in the late Greek-Roman world was the establishment of one strong orthodox current, to which all efforts for scientific development could have been tied together. Instead, centrifugal forces prevailed and led to the fall and disintegration of the entire Western classical culture. It is true that the majority of the dominant class was largely formed by stoic doctrines, which supplied a solid ethical basis for the formation of strong characters, but stoic cosmology and physics
different trajectories without offering a criterion to decide which of the two is the right one. In some branches of physics, as, for instance, in dynamics of fluids, these cases are very common. As an example, the transition between a laminar and a turbulent flow takes place through a point of bifurcation mostly with an unforeseeable outcome. The deepened study of the differential equations showed that only for enough simple cases it was possible to demonstrate the existence of a unique
physics in that year. Consequently, what in the first decades of the twentieth century was a small group of scientists who worked within a few dozen universities, exploded in the years after World War Two to become a vast international scientific community (It is sufficient to mention here that in recent years 10–20 % of physics students at American universities are foreign citizens and since 2001 the number of doctorates obtained by these latter exceeds that obtained by Americans citizens).3
is a great number of more or less fantastical “explanations” of this kind, but none up to now has proved to be valid. Actually, the attempts to intuitively and visually14 explain the cause of the law of gravity date back to the time of its discovery. Someone directly asked Newton what this meant. “It means nothing and tells us nothing.”—he answered—“It tells us how is the motion and this should be enough. I have told you how a mass moves, not why.” Furthermore, it is worthwhile reading what he
