The limits of official science

written by Paul Dutkai

Is there a limit to the cognition of reality based on scientific methods? Or on the contrary, does scientific cognition have infinite potentials?

Those who have read the books of Jules Verne, such as (Captain Nemo, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) must be disappointed: while some expectations of the author have been fulfilled (e.g. submarines and moon landing), the dreams prompted by the behaviour and mentality of the protagonists have not become true. According to these dreams, the proper use of scientific achievements would lead to the immediate solution of social problems - that is, peace, human solidarity and benevolence.

These dreams proved to be illusions and unfulfilled hopes in retrospect. Consequently, without any other option, the achievements of official science were accepted in the common knowledge. However, these achievements are not satisfactory, since official science failed to offer acceptable solutions for thousand-year-old problems of primary importance, such as wars and social problems, although there is a growing demand for a solution.  

Why have we failed to find solution for these problems? Are the demands on science exaggerated or is cognition not limitless at all? The discussion of these questions seems to be necessary and current.

It is to be noted that because of the lack of space here I have to confine myself to the discussion of tendencies without using too many detailed examples. Consequently, I am going to refer to widely known facts in the demonstrating process and elaborate on the individual examples only to the necessary extent.

Even nowadays it can be observed that in the life of the still existing ”natural” tribes the faith in gods and mythology mix up and coexist with scientific explorations, where faith and mythology are supposed to ensure help for the conscious human transformation of nature. This tendency can especially be traced in the life of less organised ”natural” tribes in certain territories (e.g. those in the TV series The paradise of chieftains). Furthermore, the same tendency is present in history in later states of development as well: for example, let us consider the civilization at Nile in the ancient Egypt where the tribal organization was developed into a well-structured state. In the process of the development the characteristics of the separation of science, faith and mythology can be traced well. The faith in gods and mythology became the base of the social structure, where the divine origin of the pharaohs and the absoluteness of the system were emphasized. At the same time, one section of the state structure, that is, certain institutions had the role of investigating the natural environment and not only gather but also transmit knowledge. Thanks to the growing knowledge, the coming of the Nile’s flood could be predicted and a developed economy could be established under the given circumstances. The success of the ancient social structure is represented by the pyramids that were built in ancient Egypt.

Several parallels can be traced between the above mentioned social structure and the initial period of European culture. The frames of tribal organization changed into the new-born state-level organization. At the same time, faith and mythology developed into or was succeeded by the state religion, which ensured the absoluteness of the contemporary structural arrangements (that is, feudalism) for a long time. The spreading of literacy made it possible to store the growing amount of knowledge. It has often been said about children who were always reading books that ”it is never too late to learn”. The geocentric worldview offered comparatively broad frames for becoming acquainted with the living environment, which was realized also in the development of agricultural engineering, e.g. the use of manure and crop-rotation appeared. Specialization and integration in science can be traced even at this structural level.

Specialization: the gathering, application and transmission of knowledge by investigating the living environment with either official or permitted methods.

Integration: this served to support the official worldview by acknowledging only those scientific achievements that reinforced it. This way, integration contributed to the strengthening of the institutions that aimed at supporting the absoluteness of the given system, e.g. the state religion.

The already existing alchemists, whose profession was the predecessor of chemistry together with its products (medicines and other chemical products), were only looked at as quacks. They were rarely tolerated, rather condemned. When the system of feudalism became too rigid and narrow for the further improvement of science, it also hindered the efficiency of the further transformation of the environment to the comfort of human beings.

Something happened in the progress of European culture which was not characteristic of the history of earlier cultures. The heliocentric world view appeared. It does not only mean that the centre of the world is not the Earth, but also that it is worth studying the characteristics of the inert matter. Astronomy, physics and chemistry started to develop; the achievements were put into practice. The efficiency of the transformation of the environment extended to the inert matter as well. The progress of economy and human structures took a new direction. The new world view is unquestionably based on the achievements of scientific cognition. Today we think of the great discoverers with the feeling of honour, although their effort was not acknowledged in their own time at all. Galileo retracted his doctrines because of the inquisition, and declared only right before his death that ”the Earth still moves”, although the new worldview had already had its practical influence. Columbus travelled to America on the new route three times. He strongly believed that he had been to India, and he was also imprisoned. Amerigo Vespucci realized that Columbus had discovered a new continent, since India must be further from Europe. As a result, America was named after Vespucci.

The main beneficiary of the new achievements, where these were also utilized, was the industry. The economical power of the industrial production grows. Structural changes are inevitable, the separation of state and religion takes place. The state religion vanishes and only a small proportion of the schools is financed by the state. Later, this financial form becomes the most frequent. On the top of the structure bourgeois states, then bourgeois democracy come to life. As a result of the improvement, science becomes more structured as well, and its upper part becomes ? directly or indirectly ? part of the official structure. Hierarchy, academy, university, high school and other educational institutes appear. Despite of the initial positive effects, the limits of this new structure can be traced well today. For example, a society which was founded to sponsor new scientific inventions was dissolved in 1900 because its members thought that everything had been invented which was worth being invented, so the society was of no further use. This statement indicated that the structures became rigid and that the prevailing common knowledge can be influenced this way. However, this statement was proved wrong by the next four decades and the two world wars. The sufferings of the great scientists, discoverers and inventors continued. Still, today they are acknowledged as great masters and they are often referred to by the historians of science. However, their lives were typically very hard and only the lucky of them escaped all of the Calvary’s stations. Here are two examples. Ignác Semmelweis, who explored and abandoned the causes of childbed fever and who was later called the saviour of mothers, was not acknowledged by his contemporaries and the significance of his practical achievements was not realized. Furthermore, some of the contemporary scientists called him a quack. Edison, of whom the American society is proud even today, was the creator of several inventions. Towards the end of his career he was abandoned by his friends, colleagues and partly by his family, so he ended his life as a lonely and poor man.

The next breakthrough came with the Second World War, although right before it lots of books had been burned and acknowledged sciences were disqualified as unscientific, because they did not conform to the official ideology. We may find the phenomenon of book-burning familiar from the ancient times, when the winners of a battle often burned libraries of 40.000?100.000 papyrus rolls. Nevertheless, some of the already existing theories or scientific achievements under elaboration could be utilized. As a consequence of the Second World War structural changes occurred. The competition of the two superpowers affected the scientific territories: its effects on space research were conspicuous. However, the competition was settled not by the science or by the scientist, but it all depended on the potentialities hidden behind the structural differences, that is, the ideological limits of Central and Eastern Europe. The intellectuals are the window on the house, which is often once smashed, then glassed in again. Getting along with intellectuals can be difficult, since they often ask irritating questions, but it is not easy to do without them either, because in the winter a glassless window does not protect from the cold, ”the unavoidable evil”. Tito, the state president of Yugoslavia after the Second World War said: ”They cannot work as little, that they would not produce their low salary twice”. It is typical that in the mid-70s it was declared in a resolution, that the regular increase of the intellectuals’ salary must be lower than average, so that the differences between the salaries of any workers would vanish in the future. Naturally, this affected only the professional, everyday intellectuals.

Under the given circumstances not only the individual’s chances were narrowed, but the given working area also became far less efficient. Therefore, it is no wonder that the Cocom-list, which prohibited the handing-over of the most advanced western technology to Central and Eastern Europe, did only dot the i. Why, the competition had already been decided ? long before the intellectual product (e.g. quality, technology) was brought to the international market, where it could compete with other products. Nevertheless, we had valuable intellectual products such as the Rubik-cube. In some western experts’ opinion had the Rubik-cube been mass-produced in Hungary, we could have paid the whole sum of the national debt we owed the western powers. The manufacturing of the magic cube helped the Chinese businessmen to such great capital that it enabled them to expand their investments even to Hungary. The list of such products could be continued with e.g. the Béres-drops or the affair of the man of cherry-stone. Even nowadays it seems that the political-economical circumstances in Hungary are not favourable for the utilization of intellectual products. For example, the audience learned form the Hungarian TV program ”Background Science” (Háttértudomány) that Hungarian chemists developed a chemical substance, which improves the efficiency of the car engine up to 18%, but can be blended even up to 25%. It is very likely that this invention is swallowed by the desk drawer of a multinational company, has not been utilized, although at least the Greens should have paid attention to it. Another example is the method of identification from fingerprints with computer technology, which, according to some western experts, could have been turned to the manufacturers’ great profit. Three-thousand-million forints (cca. 12 million euros) would have been needed to begin its production in Hungary. It is interesting that the opinion of experts from the Western European countries is seemingly not acceptable for the Hungarian investors.

The spreading of natural therapeutics is a new phenomenon in our country, where it is being integrated into the process of traditional curing to help and not to substitute it. So, the curing observations of older cultures enrich the science of medicine with preventive and other methods. However, there were no scientific achievements that were expected to solve (at the end of the 90s) e.g. the problems of the lack of energy. As a result, people tended to forget about the structural problems and talked about the crisis of the European culture instead.

The same people do not acknowledge or they interpret peculiarly the theory of the Great Explosion, which changed the worldview at the turn of the 60s and 70s. One of the benefits of this theory is that it makes us suppose that the world came into being somewhere else and long before we thought earlier. As a result, the theory of the great boom extends the material world that can be investigated from a scientific point of view. Moreover, the inventors of this theory must suppose indirectly that all material and energy has other forms of occurrence, since about 70-90% of the amount of material which would be needed to make the theory possible at all, is missing. At the same time, we suppose that there are so-called black holes in the universe, in which the characteristics of materials totally change, and structures of the chemical elements from the Mendeleyev-chart are unknown. Consequently, our knowledge about the travel of light is no longer valid here, since light is trapped in the black hole and is never poured out again. Our knowledge about the origin, the travel and nature of light and our intellectual products connected to it are valid only in case of the chemical elements known form the Mendeleyev-chart, but in no other possible occurrences of material and energy. This new interpretation of the Great Explosion-theory offers new potentialities in doing research on material and energy sources. Moreover, if these researches got financial assistance, the theoretical achievements would have practical benefits and, perhaps, this would mean the beginning of the much-expected golden age.

Let us notice that it was not the human being or its natural environment that has changed in the last few thousand years, but the human being’s notions about the material world thanks to the ever-growing amount of knowledge. Our new knowledge made it possible to make new devices and become more efficient and effective in transforming the environment to the comfort of human beings.

In the end, we ask the old question again, which was posed many times by our ancestors: ”Has the world made progress by way of books?”. Or to put it into other words: ”Has the world made progress by way of knowledge?” It may be easier to answer this question with the knowledge of the facts above:

Yes, it has as much as it has been allowed to make progress!