Science is Not Fact

I'll use a classic example here, so I don't run into problems mixing my metephors. Imagine facts as you would in a murder mystery book. On page 182, our suspect is a man whose finger prints were found all over the room, whose blood matches the blood we've found on the scene, and who is described, exactly, by a young man with perfect vision and near perfect recollection, as the person killing our victim in a very distictive way with a Golf club. As it turns out, our suspect is also a pro golfer whose measured swing is in line with the forensic reading of blunt force our victim suffered. Of course, on page 213, we find out that the suspect has an identical twin brother. Now, this is hardly good fiction. It's too obvious and too improbable. Once you've read the explanation once, the punchline is forever ruined for you... and I guarentee you've read it at least once.

Now on another plant, one in which identical twins are more prevelant, the mystery would have seemed so obvious you need not have read past page 182. So where do we run into problems. Where do we find a people who would be so fooled by such a riddle, the answer would never occur to them? We would have to find a world of 'one's. The liklihood of such a world, I'll admit, is rather preposterous. But this is only because we are looking for an exact missing fact. When the missing fact could be anything at all, the probability of 'here' being in any way different from 'there' rises significantly. Science assures us that, because we can see 'over there', that we may gather information about 'over there' in every way that matters. So much depends on where 'over there' is. What if, by a definition we have not yet found parametres for, anything truly 'over there' is invisible to the naked eye. What if other realms and other spaces exist 'over there' that we are not in tune with? Science runs a cable of rules from 'here' to 'there'. They are 'universal constants'. It tests theories of light and energy and finds very few dark spots, one per gallexy. Science had predicted these dark spots. Science is facinated with these dark spots. There is a wiff in the air that these dark spots are page 213. Science is not fact but, so long as there are universal constants, so long as the predictions of science are made and questioned, rephrased and answered, there is the hope that science will, one day, compute all the facts.

I suspect that day, were it to arise, would not give birth to an enlightened humanity, science's secret hope. When we run out of facts, when we are forced to admit our own puny futures from our own puny reality, I suspect we will do as we have always done and ignore facts, twist them, molest them with meaning. After that, if we survive, we may truly begin to understand. Perhaps we will understand because we will shrink the universe down to our level of understanding. Perhaps we will simply be more. Perhaps understanding will be all that is left of us.

Then they will say of us:

Here lies humanity: They understood so that we did not have to.




Peace,
Nicole