What Does Science Tell Us?

Why there’s no such thing as absolute scientific truth but there’s definitely such a thing as the scientific process

Image credit: CornishStuff

I love science. It’s the one thing we humans have invented that enables us to escape occasionally from our near-total inability to deal with reality. Thanks to science we’ve discovered that the universe is unimaginably vast. We’ve discovered the means by which phenotypical traits are passed on to descendants. We’ve learned that we weren’t modeled like plasticine by some invisible magic pixie but rather we evolved, like all life on Earth, from a common ancestor that originated far back in the early years of our planet’s existence.

Science enables us to understand the extraordinary multi-step process by means of which chlorophyll uses captured photons to power the core metabolic processes of plants. Science has enabled us to learn that the apparent solidity of the material things we see all around us is an illusion and that in fact our material world comprises agglomerations of unbelievably tiny atoms that are in turn built from even smaller components — and that this type of material comprises less than 5% of the total mass-energy density of the universe.

We’ve learned that the universe is governed by the speed of light and that far from being deterministic…