The Spirit of Science
// December 16th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Pragyan
Science has taken twists and turns through the ages. Right from the time when people first looked up at the night sky and just wondered what was up there, people have sought the answer to the question ‘why?’ Why does the sun rise? Why do some things twinkle in the night sky, while others do not? And what happens when we take a closer look at something far above? Hence, was born Science. It was born from the question ‘why?’ Science has given us reasons, at least valid to human reason, of the realities around us.
And there have been those moments in time when laws were enunciated in the spirit that they would never be violated. The apple fell on Newton’s head and ‘gravity’ entered our vocabulary. Newton’s law of gravitation presented a model of the universe acceptable to the seventeenth century man; for a layman, it answered why an apple falls on his head. It reinforced the intuitive idea of cause and effect. The gravitational law based on masses and the distance between masses was able to explain motions of planets and hence came the Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, there came a mind that was not satisfied by the fact that gravity was a cause of the nature of bodies; Albert Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity and General Relativity broke this framework of mass causing gravity and wove everything into space-time fabric. The Special Theory introduced an interesting concept – the ultimate speed limit in the universe as the speed of light.
Enough of the history; the talk of the day is that something went faster than light – the neutrinos that CERN fired from Geneva to Gran Saso that arrived 80 nanoseconds earlier than light would have taken. The ramifications of this observation are that time travel would be possible and every other ad hoc associated.
It appears that Science changes color like a chameleon so as to camouflage itself into our mind of reason. It’s the spirit of enquiry that makes science change color. And it is that spirit of endeavor that has taken man to the moon and to the point of travelling in time. And it’s this spirit of scientific wonder that is looked for at Pragyan 12! You don’t have to be in born and all wired… Just be yourself and let your mind free to question and explore!








