If We Could... |
Late at night, on a chilly hill in Sumeria, a solitary shepherd shifts his sitting position slightly. He pulls his cloak a little tighter. He is watching his several dozen sheep, as he has for thousands of nights now. Before him, his father watched the family’s sheep for thousands of nights, and his father before him. One of the ewes will soon give birth, and the shepherd will help. Above him, the points of light in the sky are again very intense. He has watched them every night for these years since he took charge of the flock. The points of light form pictures, and the pictures seem to tell stories. His sisters say the pictures are patterns set by the Gods to give people guidance. They say your life will be different, depending on the positions of the pictures when you are born. The shepherd isn’t sure about that, but he loves the beauty of the pictures and the magical way they move across the sky, during each night and with the seasons. Could they mean something? How far away are they? Why are some points brighter than others? He misses the pictures when mist clouds the sky. Sometimes he tries to remember the pictures during the day, and he draws them with a stick in dirt. The pictures stay longer if there is a mud patch to draw in, and then the patch dries.
Three thousand years later, and less than a thousand miles away, a man is persuading the Queen of Spain to pay for a grand shipping experiment. He wants to sail to the East Indies, going the wrong way. Everyone knows the world is flat, and his ship will fall off the world’s edge and the crew will die. The man argues that he has seen ships gliding slowly downward as they disappear at the horizon; he believes this to be proof that the world is round. In a few years, he will go and return several times, with exotic proof of strange faraway lands. Many will watch as his ships sail out of port and slowly glide downward at the horizon, not suddenly dropping. Until he returns the first time, they will wonder and argue about his observations. Most think he is obviously and tragically crazy. The Church knows his ships will fall off the Earth’s edge, and he will not be back to cause trouble with his imbecilic and disturbing ideas. The Church is thinking of politics, power, and influence. It has, as yet, no inkling of how disturbing this man’s lifework will be to the cultures and natural environment of the New World.
Less than a hundred years later, and a few day’s carriage ride away, a man is curious about how objects fall. He wants to know if a heavier object will fall faster than a lighter object, when both are dropped out of a high window at the same time. Most of his neighbors think he is wasting his time on such useless questions, but they gladly gather below the window to help watch. This silly game is harmless for now. The objects hit the dirt lane at the same time. The curious man sits or paces in his upstairs study, writing strange things and calculating. When he is old, he will be convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to house arrest for the last 8 years of his life.
In the New World, a few generations after the old man is convicted, two men are putting together an expedition. They want to see what the landforms, rock strata, and river shape are like, in a territory in the west half of the continent. They want to map it. Only the native tribes have been there before. They say there is no more magnificent place than this deeply cut river. There is lively trade between the white hunters and trappers and the friendly native tribes. Native tribesmen often are available as guides and as advisors on wilderness survival. With the expedition launched, the explorers are awestruck at the grandeur and beauty of the towering cliffs above the river. They take copious notes on the plant life, animal species, and especially the magnificent canyon’s rock layers. They make the first maps of the river and canyon. Some of the team will return, and some will not. Later visitors will call this breathtaking place simply, "The Grand Canyon".
In each of these slices of history, people saw patterns in natural places and processes. They tried to identify the patterns and describe them. They drew what they saw and they made notes. Their curiosity and their observations led to wide discussion of these phenomena, and eventually groups of professionals began to collect larger fields of data and to agree on "truth" in each field. We began to use the word "science". Today, we have the sciences of astronomy and animal husbandry, which began with the Sumerian shepherd. We have navigation sciences, astrophysics, and stratigraphic geology. We have a rich array of social sciences and life science fields. We talk about "scientific proof", now, to determine if something is true. We ask for longitudinal double-blind studies to determine if a nutrient is "good for you". I hear friends belittle each other for saying they see a pattern that "has not been scientifically proven". Culturally, we have forgotten that all sciences began with observation.
Some say Einstein was the greatest scientist of all time. He observed, he made notes, then he asked how these things could be true, not "if" they could be. At the height of his work, after his "Golden Decade", Einstein showed that he remembered well that science begins with a truth, then works to explain it. When asked what moved him to his passionate pursuit of physics, he said, "I had set out to explain God!"
I know a man who believes he has developed a system that will revolutionize astronavigation. He believes his work will reduce space travel times and save billions of dollars in costs. Many people think he’s crazy, but harmless for now…