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Mario,
I didn't "go wrong", I'm just stating an obvious fact from my social environment. If somebody went wrong it was "them", not me :)
See, the greek philosophers lived thousands of years ago and people still want to know what they thought. I'm sure thousands of years from now our science will still be considered a great achievement, but I'm really skeptical that 3,000 years from today science people will still ask scientists the kinds of questions they ask today.
Case in point. I'm reading an article about music in a general-interest magazine. The article is titled "the mystery of music". Since music is a mystery, the author obviously had to go to the people who understand more about music than anything else. Who could those people be? If you thought "musicians", you were dead wrong. The right people to ask questions these days are always "scientists".
So the scientists proceed to "explain" music by showing how male primates make rudimentary sounds to attract sexual partners. Evolution, man, evolution! It explains everything! So when you think of Ludwig van Beethoven spending ten years to compose his ninth symphony, trying to arrive at the perfect combination of notes which most emphatically communicates his universal message of brotherhood and love, according to scientists what he was really concerned about was sex!
There's a name for that kind of thinking. It's called rubbish, and our age is as full of it as any other. The only difference is that we can't see rubbish in scientific claims because, well, they are scientific, and science is absolutely sacred and beyond criticism from people who consider themselves intelligent and well-educated (yours truly excepted of course :)
So science will stay, but scientific rubbish, like religious rubbish, like artistic rubbish, like philosophical rubbish, will not, and that's a good thing. It means we're making progress. |
