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[MUSIC]
Today we begin the fourth and last part of this course.
In the first part of the course, we discussed the
[UNKNOWN]
revolution and its impact on the world.
In the second part of the course, we examined the agricultural revolution.
In the third part of the course,
we discussed the process of human unification.
How money, and empires, and universal religions.
caused the whole of humankind to be unified into a single system.
How for example,
let me take my friend the dollar again from the pocket.
How for example today in the world.
All the people in all the world understand what this is and respect this very much.
How, for example, of many people around the world, they can
understand what's written on it in Latin script and in English.
Say, Federal Reserve Note.
The United States of America.
This note is legal tender.
Millions of people around the world understand it, thanks to the legacy of
the Roman Empire with its Latin script and the British Empire with its English.
And this note also says on it, in God we trust.
And hundreds of millions, billions of people around the world trust this god.
And therefore, they also trust this dollar.
This is the legacy
of the universal religions like Christianity and Islam.
So this was the third part of the course.
In the last part of the course, we,
we, will dedicate our attention to the scientific revolution.
And to the political, social, and economic implications of the scientific revolution.
The scientific revolution is the name that we
give to the phenomenal growth of human power over the last 500 years,
which resulted from the discoveries and inventions of modern science.
In speed and magnitude, nothing like it has every happened before.
If for example, a peasant who lived in the year 1000 AD fell asleep and
woke up 500 years later, in the year 1500 AD, the
world which the arriving peasants would've encountered, would have seemed
to this peasant very similar to the world which he left 500 years previously.
Despite many changes in technology, in
political boundaries, in beliefs and so forth,
on the whole, it was the same world. The life of most
people, the simple peasant was almost exactly the same
in the year 1500 as they were in the year 1000.
But, if a person from the year 1500 would have fallen asleep.
And woke up today in the early 21st century.
He or she would have found themselves
in a completely different world strange beyond comprehension.
They might well have thought of themselves that they are no longer on earth
and the only question left open, is whether this is heaven or this is hell.
But it is certainly not Earth.
Things which we today take for granted, like nuclear
bombs, or airplanes, or vaccination, or cellular phones, or computers,
were completely beyond the wildest dreams of people 500 years
ago. Abilities which today you and me take for
granted, like talking on the phone with somebody on the other side of the world.
Or reaching the other side of the world in 24 hours, they were considered
500 years ago to belong to angels and gods.
For instance, now I'm talking to you over the Internet.
I'm talking to maybe tens of thousands of
students at the same time over the Internet.
Try to explain this to somebody living in the age of Columbus
or take for example, this lamp. Which have accompanied us from
the Big *** until now and I never referred to it, I never said
anything about it, so now it's the time to say something about this lamp.
If I want light, I simply
press a button and there is light and I don't want this light
anymore so I again press a button, a button and the light disappears.
Now for us this is trivial it's, it's we
don't think about it its some kind of amazing
power, but try to explain this power and where
it came from to our ancestors 500 years ago.
You would found it, it's, it's completely
beyond their, not only means of understanding, but even beyond their
dreams and fantasies. How did humans obtain all these powers?
From lights to nuclear weapons, and
internet, and airplanes, and things like that?
Above all humans obtained these powers
by investing resources in scientific research.
Until the early modern period humans all over the world invested
very little effort in scientific research, because they
doubted their ability to obtain new medical, or
military or economic powers. Kings and emperors certainly
gave money to education and scholarship but
the main aim of scholarship in the pre-modern world was to
preserve existing capabilities and not to acquire new
capabilities. The typical king gave money to priests,
and philosophers, and poets in the hope that they would legitimize his rule.
And maintain the social order.
He did not expect these priest philosophers to discover new
medications, to invent new weapons or to stimulate economic
growth. In the last five centuries however, humans
increasingly came to believe that they could gain new, more
and more powers by investing money and resources in
scientific research.
And this wasn't just blind faith, it was repeatedly proven in practice.
Investing resources in scientific research indeed gave people
more and more power. And the more power that it gave them, the
more resources they were able and willing to put even, to put into even
more research.
For example, the government of the United States, for the last few
decades, have allocated billions of dollars to study nuclear physics.
The knowledge produced, by all this research, has made possible,
the construction of nuclear power station, which provide cheap electricity,
for american industries.
These industries, now pay more taxes, to the United States government, which uses,
some of these taxes, to finance even more research, in nuclear physics.
And so forth and so on.
You can see here the basic feedback loop of the scientific revolution in action.
The basic message of the feedback
loop, and the basic message of this entire lesson is that
science needs more than just research in order to make
progress. Science and scientific research depend
on mutual reinforcement between science, politics,
and economics. Political and economic institutions
provides resources, without which scientific research is
almost impossible. In return, scientific research provides
new powers that are used among other things to obtain new resources.
And, some of these new resources are reinvested back in research.
So, this is the basic feedback loop of the scientific
revolution, and in order to understand the scientific revolution.
It is therefore, not enough to study just science.
What Newton said, and what Galileo said, and what Einstein said.
You must also understand the bonds between science, politics, and economics.
In this lesson, the first lesson of the fourth part of the
course, we will look at the unique nature of modern science.
We'll try to understand how is modern
science different from all previous traditions of knowledge?
In the following lessons, we will examine closely the
formation of the alliance between science and politics and economics.
In particular, we will
look at the eh, eh, formation of the bond between modern science, the European
empires and the economics of capitalism, the capitalist system of economics.
But let's begin, first of all, with understanding what makes modern
science so unique, so different from all previous traditions of knowledge.
After all,
at least since cognitive revolutions, humans have always
tried to figure out how the universe works.
This is not something new.
Of the last 500 years.
Our ancestors, thousands and even tens of thousands
of years ago, they put great deal of
time and effort in trying to discover the
rules that govern the natural world around them.
So,
what is so special and different about modern science?
Well, modern science differs from all previous traditions
of knowledge in three critical ways. First and the
foremost, it differs its willingness to admit ignorance.
Modern science is based on the admission that we
do not know.
Modern science assumes that we don't know everything.
Even more importantly, modern science accepts that the things that we
think we know, could still be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge.
In modern science no concept, no idea,
no theory is considered sacred, and beyond challenge.
So this is the first unique characteristic of modern science.
The second unique characteristic is the centrality of observation and mathematics.
After admitting ignorance what modern scientists tried
to do is to obtain new knowledge.
They do it by gathering observations on the world, and using
mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories.
The third unique feature of modern science is that it aims to acquire new powers.
Modern science is never content, just with
creating theories, and understanding how things work.
Modern science
uses these theories in order to acquire new
powers, and in particular in order to develop new technologies.
The real aim of modern science is not truth, it is power.
Let
us now take a closer look at each
of these three main characteristics of modern science.
Is the first characteristic as we said is the willingness to admit ignorance.
In this sense, the scientific revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge as
it is usually the depicted, the scientific
revolution has been a revolution of ignorance.
The greatest discovery that launched the scientific
revolution forward was the discovery of ignorance.
The discovery that humans do not know the answers to the most important questions.
Pre-modern traditions of knowledge like Islam, or Christianity, or Buddhism.
They asserted that everything that is important
to know about the world was already known. The
great gods, or the one almighty God, or the
wise people of the past. They knew everything there is to know.
And they revealed whatever we need to know in their scriptures and oral traditions.
If you want to know the answer to a important questions, all you need to do
is read these ancient texts and understand them properly.
It was inconceivable that the Bible, or the Quran, or the
Vedas were missing out on some crucial secret of the universe.
A secret that must, must still be discovered by us modern people.
Ancient traditions of knowledge admitted only
two kinds of ignorance.
First, a particular individual might well be ignorant
about something very important, but, in that case, to obtain the
necessary knowledge, all that he or she needed to do, was ask somebody wiser.
There was no need to discover, something, that nobody eh, knew.
For example, if a peasant in some medieval European village wanted to know how the
human race originated, he assumed, and everybody assumed
that the Christian tradition held the definitive answer.
Maybe the peasant himself didn't know that all he needed to
do in order to receive an answer was to ask the priest.
And if the priest didn't know, then he
asked the bishop or the pope, and they knew
by looking at the sacred texts, and understanding them.
Secondly, the other, option for there being ignorance in the world is
that, not only one person, but all people might be ignorant of unimportant things.
By definition,
according to the traditional religions and so forth.
Whatever the great gods, or the wise people of the past, did not
bother to tell us in the sacred texts and traditions, was unimportant.
For example, if a medieval peasant wanted
to know, say, how spiders weave their webs.
It was pointless to ask the priest or the bishop or the Pope because they
didn't know and there was no answer to
this question in any of the Christian scriptures.
It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible how spiders weave their webs.
However, this did not mean that Christianity was deficient.
It meant that understanding
how spiders weave their webs was unimportant.
After all, God, knew perfectly well everything, including how spiders do it.
If this was a vital piece of information necessary for human prosperity and
salvation, God would have taken care to
include a comprehensive explanation of spiders in
the Bible, but there was no such
explanation so this showed that this was unimportant.
Now, Christianity did not forbid people to study spiders if they so liked.
People engaged in the study of spiders had to accept their
peripheral role in society. And they had to accept the irrelevance
of their findings to the eternal truths of the Christian religion and society.
No matter what a scholar might discover
about spiders, that knowledge was just trivia.
With no potential bearing on the fundamental
truths of society and politics and economics.
In fact,
things were never quite so simple.
In every age, even in the most pious and conservative age, there were always
people who argued that there were important
things of which their entire tradition was ignorant.
Yet such people, before the modern age,
they were usually marginalized or persecuted or
else they founded a new tradition and began to
argue that they now knew everything that there is to know.
For example, the prophet Muhammad began his religious
career by condemning his fellow Arabs for living in ignorance
of the divine truth. Yet, Muhammad, himself, very quickly,
begin to argue that, he knew the whole
truth because it was revealed to him by God.
And the followers of Muhammad, therefore, began
calling him the seal of the prophets.
The last prophet.
Because after Mohamed, there is no need of further revelations.
His revelations contain all the truth humanity needs to know.
Modern day science is very unique, because it openly
admits our collective ignorance regarding not trivial
matters, but regarding the most important questions of all.
And scientists when they say that previously we didn't
know, scientists usually do not start arguing
that now they know everything.
Darwin, for example, never argued that he was the seal of the biologists.
The last biologist and that now he has solved, once
and for all, all of the big questions of life.
Even after centuries of extensive scientific
research, biologists, and physicists, and chemists, and
so forth. They admit, that they still don't have any
good explanation, for example, for the way the brain produces consciousness.
So, we don't know how the brain does it.
Physicists admit that they don't know what caused the Big *** and they don't
know how to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of general relativity.
So this is the first to characteristic of modern science, its
willingness to come and say, we don't know, to admit ignorance.
This willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science far more
dynamic and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.
But modern science does not stop there.
Once it admits ignorance, it begins to seek new knowledge.
And the second unique characteristic of modern science
is the way in which it seeks knowledge.
We will discuss this novel way, the scientific way of, of
seeking knowledge and the impact which it had upon the world.
[MUSIC]
In the next segment.
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