Is science flawed?

Posted on January 12, 2022  •  4 minutes  • 739 words

Think about it. Why do you call infinite as not defined? Why can we not cure all diseases? Why is Schrodinger’s cat so weird? and why can’t we cross the energy utilization efficiency of life? The answer is because an infinite is infinite. A disease is a disease. A superposition is a superposition and a biological process is a biological process. Yes, this seems confusing. Your curious explorer took this task to try and understand if there is a flaw in science that limits our ability to achieve greater things. Join me through this journey and let’s see if we could arrive at an answer.

Let us first look at how science works. Scientific thought was thought to be established first by Aristotle with logic, observation and demonstration as the basis. Science works by asking a question and answering it with a story. A common question about the occurrence of a solar eclipse has been given stories by different civilizations. One such story that originated in Japan talks about the goddess of the sun entering a cave. Interestingly, Japan sees a solar eclipse during a similar season the story is set to, and the story also indicates the high tides during solar eclipse and rooster calls just after. The story has logic, observation and demonstrable evidence. Now comes the question; what makes the story told by science more accurate? Objectivity is what makes science reliable.

Though scientists have different opinions that could bias their investigation, science as a body is objective to all kinds of opinions. Once a proposed story gains heavy evidence through the current observations, the story is considered true. Taking an example of the origin of life, science initially believed that life arose by creation and with increasing observations, we now believe in spontaneous generation of life. Creationism is not rejected because science does not believe in supernatural events. We observed life can adapt to bring diversity and lead to the formation of new species. These observations led to the rejection of creationism because it does not offer an explanation of the origin of adaptation.

Looking a bit closer, it is the amount and diversity of observations that bring authenticity to a said story. The story where Neanderthals and Humans coexisted has got evidenced by more than a hundred thousand published literature just in the last decade. If one could say, the greatest strength of science is data. Analyzing this data precisely and accurately is highly essential and this is where statistics comes in. There is always a trend that exists in a huge number of observations. This trend often becomes the rule, although we know that many data points do not comply with the rule. The exclusion of outliers could be called a flaw in science.

Though science looks only at the most probable event, the measurement of the event itself is something to consider. Not everything is measurable. One cannot measure the purity of a soul. Humans are limited to taking information from the five senses and science too has limitations in this aspect. While the majority of the flaws of science, as one would want to call it, lies in the limitation of measurement to the five senses, the act of measurement could also deviate results from reality. Currently, tracking a living cell is possible only by shining a light intensity on a single cell that is around 16 times greater than the light seen on a regular day. We can only track and measure them in a non-natural environment and assume that the behaviour is similar. Moreover, we cannot take the measurement as an absolute entity. We are bound to the relativity of space, time and all the other known and unknown variables that impact our measurement.

One might stop to wonder if science is all about validating a story with the given measurements and predicting the trend. I must tell you this is only half of the story. The great power of science comes in manipulating the predicted pattern to give an application. Manipulating the natural processes is the very reason you have this device to read this content. This is the very reason that you could drive to your favourite restaurant and eat some delicacies. Well, it is also the reason for global warming and climate change. The power of science is not only to hunt the truth, but the true power also lies in the applications it could provide.