05-12-2012, 05:53 PM
10 Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet)
10 Questions Science Can--t Answer (Yet) - (Malestrom).pdf (Size: 1.27 MB / Downloads: 62)
How we laugh now at those daft Victorians. They thought
they knew everything. To them, the Universe was a small and
well-ordered sort of place, consisting of a few million stars.
The planets were held aloft by Newton’s well-ordered apron
strings, and the whole cosmos ticked away like a Swiss clock.
Down here on Earth they knew that life began in a warm
little pond, and that its subsequent evolution was governed
by Mr Darwin’s grand thesis. Stuff was made of atoms, of
about a hundred different flavours, which behaved like mini
versions of the planets: tiny, well-behaved billiard balls. Science
was nearing its end – all that was left was to cross the ‘t’s
and dot the ‘i‘s. We were nearly at the Summit of Total
Understanding.
The summit turned out to be a false one. A whole series of
brilliant and bothersome insights in the early 20th century
threw so many spanners into the scientific works that we were
forced to more or less rip everything up that we thought we
knew and to start again.
We now know that the Universe is rather larger, and more
ancient, than Kelvin and his contemporaries imagined. We
know how the stars shine, what they are made of and how
they evolve.