late night musings: Neither we or science are infallible

late night musings

"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words." --- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Neither we or science are infallible

(Note to readers: This is about more than just science - read on.)

Science is infallible, that is until the next theory proves it to be even more infallible. In 1903, the Scientific American magazine made note that some cutting edge thinking was suggesting that perhaps the atom was not the smallest form of matter. A few great minds leaned in this direction but generally most scientists labeled it scientific garbage. To most scientists, an atom was the smallest indivisible unit of matter.

Of course, in time it was proven that, in fact, within the atom there were electrons whirling around a nucleus which was made up of protons and neutrons. At that point, they then thought they had it nailed - finally finding the smallest building blocks of matter - until, of course, someone found that those were made up of quarks. And so it goes. Today the latest fashion is something called the superstring theory - a superstring is a one dimensional thing that vibrates kind of like a violin string and thus makes up the true building blocks of all matter.

Even the Catholic Church of centuries ago got locked into the same kind of rigid, dogmatic thinking. Until the times of Galileo, the Church and scientists both believed that the entire known, observable universe revolved around earth. It took quite a battle to convince them that it wasn’t true.

The simple truth is that in many matter of science, not everything is known or completely accurate. The underlying facts are often beyond the capabilities of science to discern. Nature and the universe conceals more that it reveals. Laws that work in most cases don’t work in all cases. Recall that Einstein proved that what Newton expounded inadequately described what is at play in the universe. Now science knows that not even Einstein’s work completely describes how the universe operates. Thus we have quantum mechanics to help us understand the working of particles. And someday, sooner or later, someone will come along and further clarify the rules and laws that dictate how things work.

So it is with people. We seem to be most comfortable with beliefs and ideas about people and things that we formed many years ago. It is hard to let go of those when they are proven wrong. To do so upsets our comfort zone. They require us to admit we were wrong, something that most of us loathe doing. For if we are wrong about one thing or person, it could be that we may be wrong about other things or people - maybe we aren't infallible.

We live in times wherein our knowledge base is exponentially greater than it was in centuries past. But even today we don't know everything - not yet at least. We also live in a time when what we know today in many ways is more accurate than what we knew years ago. What we once knew as true isn't always true today - and what we know as true today may not be true tomorrow. That is also true about people. Those who are wise understand this; for the rest, they blindly go on, believing they are infallible.