By James Burke
I'm kind of jealous of the way Burke can mix fun historical trivia with deep philosophical meaning. At times though, you can loose site of the deep significance of what he's getting at. It can come across as a "Gee Wiz! Look at all these cool innovations!"
What do I want to remember?
That science only looks for what it expects to find. (That people only look for what the expected to find?) This is a deep circular problem. Sure, sometimes reality laps us in the face with the evidence, But much of the time it's true nature is deep and indirect and we must build special tools to observe it. All we really know then is what our tools find. The model we build up is all in our mind. As the models in our mind change, as what we expect to find changes, as the tools we build to measure reality changes, so will science change. Always stumbling towards the truth, never quite find it. Contrast this with Christianity or Buddhism which, to its believers, has adequately explained the universe for thousands of years.
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