"Science and common sense inquiry alike do not discover the way in which events are grouped in the world, they invent ways of grouping."
JEROME BRUNER
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Sayfa 26
History repeats, but science reverberates.
I have often heard it said that there are different ways of getting to ‘the truth’, or indeed that there are different sorts of truth. No doubt a philosopher or a theologian reading this will regard my simplistic physicist views on the matter as hopelessly naïve, but, for me, absolute truth refers to what is real and what exists independently of human subjectivity. So, when I talk about science as being the quest for truth, I mean that scientists are constantly trying to get as close as possible to the ultimate nature of things, to an objective reality out there waiting to be discovered and understood. It can sometimes feel as though this objective reality is nothing more than a collection of facts about the world that we discover slowly until we know them all. But remember that in science we can never claim to know something for certain. There is always the chance that, at some later time, we will arrive at an even deeper understanding, taking us closer to that ultimate truth we seek.
Surely, you might think, the discovery of the Higgs boson won’t have any sort of direct impact on our daily lives; nor will the hoped-for theory of quantum gravity help to eradicate poverty and disease. But this is not the right way to look at things. Fundamental, curiosity-driven science has, time and again, led to technological advances that have revolutionised our world. Most physics researchers, particularly those working in academia, are not typically motivated by the potential applications of their work, and if you look back at the great discoveries in science which later proved to have practical benefit, you will find that many of them were made out of a burning desire simply to understand the world and to satisfy scientists’ curiosity.
In summary, we cannot yet claim to have a genuine theory of everything, nor do we understand yet how to bring quantum mechanics and general relativity together. Rather, we have candidate theories that show some promise, but which still leave many questions unanswered. Brilliant physicists have built their careers on one or the other such theory, but just as with different interpretations of quantum mechanics, there is a lot of sociology of science involved, and views on which theory shows the most promise really do depend on who you speak to.