The edge of knowledge
DIVONNE, France A seminar from the frontiers of research in various fields, such as one presented here during the Forum 21 conference recently, is breathtaking. While we've been busily reading about war in Afghanistan, violence in the Middle East and fallout from the Enron scandal, the scientists have been quietly but steadily pressing on with revelation of nature's secrets.
Reporting to about a hundred laymen on the latest word from their specialties, a cosmologist, a particle physicist, a molecular biologist, a nanoelectronics physicist and an astronaut showed that the understanding of the physical world has changed profoundly in recent years.
Passports, religion and cultural tradition are irrelevant. It takes knowledge to grasp the voice of science, but it is a single voice, open to all. That is particularly evident nearby at CERN, the European atom-smashing laboratory that is now building a 27-kilometer supercollider to find the particle that is believed to be responsible for the existence of mass. People from all kinds of countries work easily together, even if their countries don't recognize each other or are at war.
But as each expert explains the latest developments in his field, what is most impressive is no longer the tremendous progress made in the last century or so but the increasing awareness of how much is unknown. Not so long ago, we had the impression we were near to discovering the ultimate facts of existence - just a few more basic questions, scientists thought, and the essentials would be clear.
On the contrary, new research is finding more and more to study, critical things we didn't even know we needed to know.
David Shore, a molecular biologist at the University of Geneva, points out that the tremendous feat of finding the sequence of the human genome brought the astonishing knowledge that we have only twice as many genes as a fly or a worm.
That means that the genes themselves don't explain as much as we thought, that there is some further process, some interaction to determine how they work. Some techniques have been learned to influence the array of genes, but we still don't know how they do what they do. Nature is constantly manipulating, interfering and experimenting, and we have no idea why it sometimes produces new results and sometimes failures.
This is humbling. It is a reminder that hubris is not in trying to penetrate the secrets of nature but in imagining that we already have and can control the outcome. The same lesson is offered insistently from many fields of science. We can do things we could never do before because of improved knowledge of nature, such as to release energy from the atom, but we don't know how to make sure that the new knowledge is used in an ethical context.
John Barrow, a cosmologist from the University of Cambridge, explained how much more about the origins of the universe than we thought is recorded in the waves still reaching us. The further back we can probe, because of improved sensitivity of instruments, the more dense the information, and the more likely it may be to tell us whether the universe will go on expanding indefinitely until its substance is so thin it seems to disappear, or whether there is a limit and then it will contract until eventually it collapses with the unimaginably big bang with which it started.
Rusty Schweikhart, an Apollo 9 astronaut, has become obsessed with the fragility of life on earth and the possibility of total extinction not only through human evil and stupidity but also through natural disaster, such as the asteroid that apparently wiped out the dinosaurs and 70 percent of life forms 65 million years ago. To obey nature's striving for survival, he advocates extra-terrestrial colonies, probably on Mars, where the human race could go on reproducing.
Besides, he argues, the large amount of useless material in human chromosomes, what geneticists call "the junk," may be left over from a previous existence that was almost all wiped out. It could happen in the future. It could have happened before, he says.
The greatest lesson of science these days, as it floods us with amazing possibilities, is the excitement of learning why we need humility.
- 2002 -
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