Astrophotography of the cosmic palace (Yu-Cing Chang and Saumya Singhal)
It is difficult to study the history of science without feeling a little sufficient. Look at the things our ancestors believed! The ancient Greeks USD are bleeding to correct the images of the personality. The ancient Egyptians thought that the sun was burned every night to be rekindled the next day. Compare this to our jet planes and computers and modern medicine, and ancient people seem to be intellectual shadows of ourselves.
But scientifically, they are not. The human brain has been practically unchanged in the past 10,000 years. In other words, the alchemists and doctors of the plague of the past were just as intelligent as us.
It’s easy to say but hard to believe. Child of the 21st century, it is difficult for me to take old scientists seriously. I am separated from them by an insurmountable cultural gap.
I will never know what it does to look at the night sky without knowing if the points above me are gods or jewelry or tiny candles in darkness. To look at the sun going to bed under the horizon and having to make it obvious that it will be back in the morning. To feel a disease not as a battle between microbes and immune cells, but as a painful and unpredictable reminder of the fragility of my body.
In this sense, my scientific education cut me off from human history. I think it’s a shame and I would like to fight back. I propose that we dedicate one day a year – day of ignorance of science – abandoning everything we think about the world.
During the day, we forget each of our science lessons one by one: eliminate the fruits of the college, then high school, then college. Unable to rely on theories that have been transmitted to us, we would be forced to take the world at its nominal value. Are we made of atoms? Do our thoughts arise from electric currents? It certainly doesn’t want to want, so why believe it? In the evening, we would be deep in ignorance. A mystery coat would have settled on the world. The sky above us was swimming with inexplicable bite of light.
As an adult in physics, I think that the day of the ignorance sciences would be particularly good for scientists. It would be a healthy reminder of the way we know little. We have meticulously mapped the structures of the human brain, but we do not know why this wrinkled gray drop has curiosity and autonomy to study itself. We have determined the laws of physics that bind us during our time on earth, but we have no idea what comes before or after these eighty years. Regarding the big questions, we are always men of the caves to scratch our shaggy heads in a world that refuses to take on meaning.
We could all endure 24 hours to reconnect with this truth. If we erase our mind with all our scientific notions, we could make room for new discoveries. Otherwise, we risk becoming so used to standing on the shoulders of the giants that we forget what it is to walk on earth.