Cosmic Palace Astrophotography (Yu-Ting Chang and Saumya Singhal)
It’s hard to study the history of science without feeling a little big smug. Just look at the things our ancestors believed! The Ancient Greeks usd bloodletting to correct for personality imbalances. The Ancient Egyptians thought that the sun burnt itself out every evening, only to be rekindled the next day. Compare this to our jet planes and computers and modern medicine, and ancient people seem like intellectual shadows of ourselves.
But scientifically speaking, they are not. The human brain has remained virtually unchanged for the past 10,000 years. In other words, the alchemists and plague doctors of the past were every bit as intelligent as us.
This is easy to say but hard to believe. As a child of the 21st century, it’s difficult for me to take ancient scientists seriously. I am separated from them by an unbridgeable cultural gap.
I’ll never know what it feels like to look at the night sky without knowing whether the dots above me are gods or jewels or tiny candles in the dark. To watch the sun sink below the horizon and have to take on faith that it will be back in the morning. To experience sickness not as a battle between microbes and immune cells but as a painful and unpredictable reminder of the fragility of my body.
In that sense, my science education has cut me off from human history. I think that’s a pity, and I’d like to fight back. I propose that we dedicate one day a year — Science Unawareness Day — to letting go of everything we think we know about the world.
Over the course of the day, we would forget each of our science classes one by one: stripping away the fruits of college, then high school, then middle school. Unable to lean on theories that have been passed down to us, we would be forced to take the world at face value. Are we made out of atoms? Do our thoughts arise from electric currents? It sure doesn’t feel like it, so why believe it? By evening, we would be sunk deep into ignorance. A cloak of mystery would have settled over the world. The sky above us would be swimming with inexplicable pinpricks of light.
As a physics major, I think that Science Unawareness Day would be especially good for scientists. It would be a healthy reminder of how little we know. We have meticulously mapped out the structures of the human brain, but we have no idea why this wrinkly gray blob has the curiosity and autonomy to study itself. We have determined the laws of physics that bind us during our time on Earth, but we have no idea what comes before or after these eighty-odd years. When it comes to the big questions, we’re still cavemen scratching our shaggy heads at a world that refuses to make sense.
We could all stand to spend 24 hours reconnecting with this truth. If we clear our minds of all our scientific notions, we could make space for new discoveries. Otherwise, we risk becoming so used to standing on the shoulders of giants that we forget what it feels like to walk on the earth.