Knowledge, Religion, and Science

An "acute awareness of our ignorance is the heart of scientific thinking," says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist and author of Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity. Science never hesitates to say "I don't know" when it does not know. Science does not take leaps of faith. Science is ready to admit its own errors when it learns better and it is ever ready to correct its errors.

Rovelli's book concludes with such thoughts. I understood only that concluding chapter. Hence this is not a book review. I bought the book seeing a few reviews which implied that a lay person could understand quantum mechanics by reading it. All the quantum mechanics I learnt from this book may be summarised in the following diagram from the book itself:

The book is mostly an elaboration of the above evolution of understanding the reality. There are a lot of technical terms and even scientific formulas which remain beyond the grasp of anyone who lacks at least a senior secondary student's knowledge of physics. I had physics as a subsidiary subject for graduation and hence photons and field theory did not sound too alien to me. Yet I could not understand much of the book.

I enjoyed parts of it, parts which made sense to me and those which related certain ways and methods of scientists. The last chapter appealed to me tremendously. Titled 'Mystery', the last chapter speaks about the virtues of science. "Science is born from (an) act of humility," says Rovelli.

"To learn something, it is necessary to have the courage to accept that what we think we know, including our most rooted convictions, may be wrong, or at least naive." If you believe what everyone else believes just because everyone else believes it, you can't ever be a scientist. Science does not have "faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers," says the author. "We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe."

What was written centuries ago need not be true today even if the author claims that it was revealed by God. The Vedas and the Puranas, the Bible and the Quran, whatever, may be capable of providing certain guidelines in one's spiritual life. But they are not valid sources of knowledge. If Copernicus and Einstein followed their religious scriptures, our world would have been moving in a darker penumbra.

"To live with uncertainty may be difficult," as Rovelli says. So we create the certainty of gods and scriptures. We blind ourselves with this forged certainty and claim that we possess the light, the ultimate truth, and then we go around killing others for not accepting our ultimate truths.

Rovelli asks "to seek to look further, to go further." If we start doing that, we will love better and live better. There is always another hill to climb, a new apple to taste, instead of clinging to the mythical Paradise and its forbidden apple.

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