Why I love science.

This was originally written as my response to this page. I felt I was eloquent enough to repeat my rant here.

Since this is one the deepest parts of myself and my personality, I could rant on and on about why science is so important to me. I could name endless anecdotes where I had a kind of science moment. I don’t even know where to begin. But, just like science, I guess you could start anywhere and build an understanding of my love of science from that point.

So, picking at random, I think a good one is when I read Godel Escher Bach in high school. I was a senior, it was 1981, I was 17, I was funking very badly in pre-calculus analysis while at the same time beginning to understand the implications of Godel’s work: Mathematics was provably infinite and would never be finished. At the same time I was watching Sagan’s Cosmos on television. Sagan said something in one episode along the lines of “…beyond the Backbone of Night, the mind of Democritus soared.” That sank in very deeply to me.

It was here, I think, that I realized that science was infinite and would go on forever and would always surprise us. Unlike every other human endeavor it would always be looking out and everything it said could be tested and shown to be provably true to anyone who was reasonable enough. All other human endeavors were fine but they were always inward looking and full of personal opinion and judgement.

I wanted nothing to do with that. I didn’t give a damn about the whys. I wanted the hows, the wheres, the whens, the whichs. I wanted all the other questions answered even if it took us an infinite amount time to get there. Science was actually doing something. It was actually generating novelty and would do so for eternity while all the rest of human endeavor was provably finite. This idea gelled up for me in university.

I was hooked. Nothing is deeper than science, nothing.

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