Last weekend, I discussed using popular culture to present science. Yesterday, PBS's NOVA physics blog, "The Nature of Reality," published an essay from me about how science fiction influences scientists.
In that article, I discuss the ways that science fiction can inspire science, making the point that the science fiction of H.G. Wells was anticipating Einstein's relativity concepts while other scientists were thinking that science was about done with its job. (This idea was pointed out in Lawrence Krauss' book Hiding in the Mirror.)
In fact, just a few years later Lord Kelvin made a speech where described "two clouds" that were on the horizon of physics at the turn of the century:
It's safe to say that?Lord Kelvin's "two clouds" speech is among the greatest?scientific under-estimations in history. While Kelvin considered this to be a mere measurement issue, instead it turned out to set the stage for a radical transformation in our way of thinking about the universe, rivaled only by the scientific revolution itself.
Today, it's easy to once again think that maybe science has all of the answers. I'll occasionally hear people who seem to think that science is in its final days, just doing some adjustments on the decimal points and then we'll be in an age where there are no new scientific discoveries to be made. Science will be finished at that point, these people claim.
Let me assure you that we're far from having all of the answers. Every discovery made by science unlocks more doors of the imagination.
Consider this:?At best, physicists can claim that we understand 4% of the universe really well. The rest is shrouded in mystery, because it consists of the poorly-understood dark matter and?dark energy that make up the other 96%.
There are still worlds to conquer and scientific secrets to unlock, and not just in the science fiction novels. Anyone who's trying to convince you that science currently has all the answers is missing out on how cool some of the questions are.
Science is nowhere close to ending.
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P.S. As I was about to publish this blog post, I discovered that my article had been quoted by Nancy Atkinson over at Universe Today, in an article about a study showing that there is little evidence of alien life. (Even I question whether this particular study was needed.)
Still, this is a cool thing to show up in your inbox. I think that this means I've gone viral!
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