Science starts with a doubt
Science starts with a doubt.
I have no doubt of it. It was the desire of knowledge (and ok, probably of survival too) that lead us to make fire in the first place and I believe that this desire is one of the main things that makes us different from other animals. As it was sang in the Jungle Book,
Ooh Doo Bee Dooo
The best thing about knowledge is that it never ends; not even during a life time we will be able to learn everything that is already known, and eventhough humans have habitated earth for many many years we are not even close to figuring everything out. Will we ever be? We certainly try, we do research.
When thinking about this I always remember the IV Rhyme of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer,
“Mientras la ciencia a descubrir no alcance
las fuentes de la vida,
y en el mar o en el cielo haya un abismo
que al cálculo resista,
mientras la humanidad siempre avanzando
no sepa a dó camina,
mientras haya un misterio para el hombre,
¡habrá poesía!”
“As long as science does not discover
the origins of life,
and in the sea or in the heaven there is an abyss
that cannot be calculated;
as long as the always advancing humanity
does not know where it’s heading;
as long as there is a mystery for man,
There will be poetry! ”
I hope we won´t, don´t get me wrong but if we do, a part of the poetry of life, the enthusiasm of learning something new and the peace of understanding something for the first time, among many other things, will be gone. Indeed there will be no research if we already knew it all, because research is learning, research is like lightening a candle in the dark, like putting colours to a grey landscape.
And as we learn we make mistakes, but if we learnt something from those mistakes, are they really just mistakes? This might be a little story for another day.
It feels amazingly good to write again
Thank you for reading,
Isa