Leaps to Primitiveness
Earth is Flat; Earth became round; Earth became a sphere; Earth further became an oblong shaped object flattened at the top. Sun revolved round the Earth, and then Earth started to revolve round the Earth.
Are we still waiting for more corrections to happen or to further simplify, are we still waiting to become more primitive? With every discovery or invention are we actually making any progress or we are just making leaps into the primitiveness? Essentially, all that is there around us, known or unknown, was there, is there and will be there. So taking a cue from there the big nagging question that irks my head, are we, at all making any progress?
A routine look into the past, dating may be any length of time, one can easily concur that at first any discovery is always based on elementary levels – something which is more obvious to the eyes or more simpler to reason. That obvious visual or reason then becomes a Law, a Theorem or a Theory and then into a regular scientific fact as the findings becomes more acceptable to the masses. A simple example, to substantiate the statement, will be gravity. Before Sir Issac Newton, no one in particular had conceived of anything called gravity, yet, it surrounded everyone’s life. The apple as usual fell, and translated into the most famous three laws of Newton, which was the fabric of every discovery for the next 300 years. Newton’s laws and Gravity became a scientific fact. Until, some another nondescript being was lurking somewhere to find something more elementary. Albert Einstein, was that another person who, gave a serious competition to the Newton’s findings – not to prove it wrong but by identifying something more basic, something more elementary which binds the nature and its mysteries in a far more convincing way. His historical work and his two fundamental theories, general relativity and special theory of relativity changed the answers to the entire gamut of questions which Newton’s eponymous laws were failing to answer. Einstein’s fundamentals pushed Newton’s ideas into classical dimension bringing his laws into the realm of the new scientific frontiers. Einstein’s Theories became scientific facts within decades and opened the doors for a galactic leap. Until, yet again, someone was crawling its way on to the points of singularity, someone who had an eye inside the layers of obvious. Roger Penrose and Stephen William Hawking gave further insights into the Einstein’s laws which Einstein’s facts were failing to answer. The scientific duo are still trying to quest a simple question, how it all started? Their seek has taken them to black holes, singularity (a point in black hole with high gravity and density), String Theory and probably the next biggest scientific discovery, Theory of Everything.
From gravity to singularity, things had always been there and they will always be and we will always discover the things in an outside-to-inside manner and thus, in fact, making our journey further into the depths of primitiveness, by scraping off the layers one by one. And despite how deep we may go, how primitive we may become in our search, the outside will always appear to hold good. Like, The horizon always looks flat and Relatively speaking, the Sun does appear to move in the sky.
