Secret Science

The science that people know, and the secret behind that science. The difference between science and magic.

Many generations ago, before Christianity, magicians lived.  They were the ones who could turn rock into metal, who could conjure fire and heal wounds.  They made the sun rise, called down the wrath of the gods and advised the whole village in case of disaster.  These secrets were passed carefully from one wise person to the next, and to the rest of the population it was magic, or the power of the gods.  The magicians were feared and respected, for the fate of their lives depended on them.

This was, shall we say, proto-science.  After all, turning rock into metal is a matter of recognising the rocks which contain metal ore and treating them to extract the ore.  If you know how to do that, it will work.  A lot of what these magicians knew was as close to science as these people could get.

So what are the differences between this magic and modern science?  Well, the first major difference is in the availability of knowledge.  Science goes out of its way to communicate with people.  Science is taught in schools, published in specialist and non-specialist newspapers and magazines.  Science museums have been built and run, science programs made, and popular science books written.  Apart from all that, there's the web, filled with all sorts of information about everything, including science.  The knowledge that the "elite" have has never been so readily available.

The result of this is that people think they know science.  They know that, perhaps, a rainbow is caused by sunlight hitting raindrops, or that hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.  They know that televisions and radios work with radio waves, or that the earth is round.  They know the names of the constellations, the particles that make up the atom, the gases which make up the air, and why plants are green.  One side effect of this is that scientists are treated with something that borders on contempt.  We know all this, they seem to say, and you're *still* poking round?  What could you possibly discover that we don't already know?  Why do you keep changing your mind about things?

But there's a big secret about science.  I was never taught it as part of my degree.  It's never published in magazines or mentioned on TV, and certainly never taught in schools.  But it's true.  And here's what it is: none of these things are science.  They are the *product* of science.  Science is about the questioning process, it's about finding things out.  The actual knowledge is secondary.  In fact, most of the time, the so-called "facts" of science are simply approximations: the best answer we can give (or the best answer you can understand at the time), but by no means true or absolute.  Newton's model of gravity works pretty well, but Einstein's works better.  An atom can be thought of as like a miniature solar system, but that doesn't mean that's what it is.  There are levels of truth in science.

With a scientist's eye, you suddenly realise that all the answers I quoted above are, in fact, misleading.  They block further questions but don't actually explain anything.  How is a rainbow formed?  By sunlight scattering from raindrops, which refract light into its component colours.  Great, now we know.  Or do we?  Why does the rain split light into colours?  Why those particular colours?  How come there is one large rainbow which stays still, rather than thousands of falling ones, one for each raindrop?  Why is the rainbow bow-shaped?  Why is there sometimes a second, fainter rainbow?  Suddenly, the rainbow becomes the mystery that it is.

There are two universal answers to all questions which have the same effect.  They are "God" and "magic".  "Why does it rain?" "Magic"  "Why is euthanasia all right for dogs but not for people?" "God says it should be so."  I'm not saying that "Because that's the way God wants it" is not true, or anything else.  My point is simply that these answers do not answer the question or enlighten the person asking, but simply block any further questions.  The magic- or God-threshold is the place where we just don't know.  Like saying that the rainbow is caused by sunlight on raindrops, it gives the illusion of having answered the question, without actually imparting any information at all.

This leads me to the second big difference between old-age magic and modern science.  Science is about explaining processes, about understanding the universe.  Magic was about exploiting the properties of the world to keep people in awe of you and to produce useful things.  Understanding was almost by-the-way.  It was about the way things are, not the whys.  Whys were answered by the stories that they told.

The magicians had the respect and often the fear of the people they served.  They kept their knowledge to themselves, and thus it became magic, and gave them power.  Scientists share their knowledge, and people think they understand, and therefore hold scientists in contempt.  But there's more to science and scientists than to high school physics, and what we know about the universe is constantly evolving; being re-written as each tiny experiment adds a little more to our knowledge.

Sometimes, things are more than they appear.