A friend asked, before leaving a potluck, for people to tell her one true and beautiful thing before she left. I said something about science and how there’s still things we don’t know. To me, this made obvious sense why such a thing is beautiful and true, but I worry that for others—that the uncertainty of the unknown, or the incompleteness of our knowledge—might seem imperfect and inelegant. But truly, this project of science is one of the most true and beautiful things we have!
Science is a collective project of humanity—to ask questions of the universe in ways that it can answer.
A Collective Project of Humanity
Lots of things can bring people together at the mass scale, and many of these things are really bad. War and nationalism can bring people to act for the same goal; superstition, religion, and fascism can bring people together, at least in superficial ways; international competition can spurn collective projects even in imperial capitalist nations like the USA during the Cold War; and class societies and their coercive modes of productions coordinate masses of people and result in mass deprivation and alienation.
Science is one of those collective projects that has the potential to bring people together for the pure sake of discovery and understanding. It is a societal motivation, which, alongside ecological sustainability and the production of satisfying lives, could replace the competitive dominance, violence, deprivation, stealing of agency, and chauvinism that characterizes most mass coordinations of humans today.
Asking Questions of the Universe
In the scientific project, humans ask questions of the universe, in ways that the universe can give us an answer. Isn’t that already such a cool thing—to have this way of communicating with the fabric of reality around us?
Now, we interact with the reality around us all the time—but science is one of the primary ways we can ask about the nature of reality and get meaningful answers. That’s because these answers aren’t mere reflections of the individual biases of the person asking the question. When we get a scientific result, we’re finding a meaningful description of reality’s relation to itself and conscious beings in general.
As scientific knowledge develops, humanity learns how we relate to the rest of reality and our place in the universe. And it seems like, no matter how much we know, there will always be more to learn.
It is a true and beautiful thing that such a collective project, of collective self-discovery, has the potential to so sustainably motivate society to develop and coordinate in ways that respect all conscious beings—unlike the domination and division that mobilize people today.
Anyways, check out the Crash Course series on Scientific Thinking, haha.