Multiple Discoveries
It never ceases to
amaze me how many different ways you could prove so many things in maths. The
famous Pythogoras theorem alone can be proved in 112 ways according to
this site that lists them all! Even if some of them turn to be repetitions
(I didn’t check them all, and let’s take that list with a pinch of salt: after
all, this is the Internet!), it still leaves a huge number of ways to prove the
same thing. Another famous example is calculus (Newton and Leibniz).
In science, there
are multiple instances of different people discovering the same thing independently. Examples include oxygen
(Scheele, Priestley and Lavoisier) the theory of evolution (Darwin and
Wallace), and quantum electrodynamics (Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga).
There’s even a
term for all this: “multiple
discovery”. It’s so frequent that Wikipedia even has a list of
multiple discoveries across the centuries! Funnily, it happened in the case
on non-Euclidian geometry where Farkas Bolyai, the father of one of its
discoverers, even warned his son to publish fast saying:
“When the time is ripe for certain things,
these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to
light in early spring.”
The question (and
bitterness) of credit aside, this phenomenon which is so rampant in science and
maths leads to another very interesting question: if God is real, how come
multiple religions never came to the same description and rules in different places independently? Today,
that may not be possible thanks to the speed of communication. But surely it
should have happened long ago, which is the time most religions were founded?
And yet, can you think of any two religions that arose far away from each other
and were pretty much, if not entirely, identical? Sure, they may have some
common ideas, but their differences are very stark. The similarity is only
better for religions that arose in geographically close regions.
I guess that’s
exactly why Penn Jillette, the famous magician, said:
“If every trace of any single religion died
out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way
again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact
nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone
would find a way to figure it all out again.”
It is my conviction that discoverer is doing exactly what is said by the word: DIS COVER or UN COVER what seems hidden or what is not so obvious on the surface. Truth is IN there! All human beings, for that matter any alien in any galaxy too, do is to dig nature's truth out, as it were. Simple: Anyone doing 'smart digging' has the probability of hitting it. Thus, even the great Einstein did nothing beyond that - his smartness was not 'inventing' any law of nature but only having been smart enough to figure out what it actually was extremely well. Had he missed it, out some other Johnny somewhere would have done just the same.
ReplyDelete----
Coming to religions (thanks to the finish quote of the blog), the glorious success story of the sciences has more or less ensured that one is strongly influenced through the power of barren rationality to conclude that "religion is not about truth but entirely about fancies". The rationalist may come so far as to admit that religious beliefs may not always be whimsical; possibly they may have sincerity in the background. That doesn't ensure truth value though".
The point I am making is that the rejection of religion is based on the belief that "religion cannot be about truth". The argument mightily in favor of it is that is, "if there is such a thing as the truth of God or whatever else religion goes after such as dharma, how come there is no uniformity or unity? Religious expressions actually can be fitted into the Bible's own expression, "ever so many people shouting senselessly from the tower of Babel!" :-) In a way, I agree with that too!
Like in sciences, in spirituality too, the seekers proceed from lesser truth (which could actually be, from another point of view, outright illogical, contradictory and wholly false) to higher truth until at last the only truth - the truth of God - is arrived at. The difficulty of religions is not that the saints have failed in arriving at the 'Truth of Spirituality'. The real difficulty is that common people, simple often naive believers, do not weed out all the false, negative, lesser and such other details from the collective mindset. That collective mindset is unfortunately is 'the religion' we all judge. Even when some believers have the ability to reject them and stand at a higher place, still falter, because the ultimate truth is indeed so elusive, very much like the most advanced truths of science. In science, if I say, "the core truth is far above normal comprehension", agreement on that already exists in science circle itself. If I say the same about the truth of spirituality, it is so easy to dismiss it with, "You are buttressing un-provable ideas by throwing words - unless you prove, you will be deemed both irrational and supporter of non-truth".
The Truth is very much there IN THERE in spirituality too. That being so, no amount of wishful thinking or powerful lobbying or even strict adherence to rationality would kill it!
I feel deep within my heart (in which the rationality is also intact - not jettisoned) the only and barren truth that is pointed out by all the regions of the world. It is certainly not any Babel tower blabbering! :-) That truth is all I care for. And live for.
My finish line after all the rambling, unfortunately, is a French quote. I do not want to mess it up by trying to translate: "Le ceuer a sa raison, que la raison no connait pas!" [If there are spelling errors in the quote, I apologize; my French is rusty. But the quote is still valid, because I can pronounce this quote in proper French even today, and that will be understandable to the French speaker!]