Why Science?

I realize that most of the people reading this are already going into the sciences for some reason or another, so this will mainly be preaching to the choir. At the same time, I need something to talk about, and the topic of science is in the news. Therefore, I shall speak. And besides, we all want to go into science for our own reasons, and these are my personal ones. Why do you want to go into science?

Science has been in the news a lot lately: President Bush spoke about the need for stronger government funding for science; Pennsylvanians and other Americans are debating the merit of the Theory of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design; and some South Korean dude apparently made up his cloning work. Of course, there's also the ubiquitous "global warming" and talk about stem cells. I guess science is always in the news. Just more so than usual at the moment.

According to a recent TIME Magazine article (which you unfortunately can't read unless you're a TIME subscriber), America is lagging behind in science. Reminds me of my Discrete Math teacher Mackey's tirade against our exhaustion. Personally, I'm not that scared about us falling behind in the science race. I'm all for globalization. I think we should stop this stupid nationalistic idea of "I'm American" "I'm Chinese" "I'm Russian." No, you're not, you're human, and the only home you really have is earth. Though the lag of science in America does scare me a little, because I would like to get a job someday. :)

But why care about science in the first place? Isn't it just all that boring acceleration, mole, evolution crap? What good has science done for us?

Well, I wouldn't be able to tell you in just one post, or even one site, the amount of good science has done for us (or the amount of bad, to be fair). We live in amazing times, times unprecedented in the past. Knowledge of every variety, not just scientific, is multiplying at drastic rates, thanks largely to the information technology developed through science. Biological breakthroughs make the possibility of not only improving the quantity of human life, which is questionable at the least, but also the quality of human life. Chemistry is making major strides towards developing new forms of fuels, NATURAL fuels that wouldn't work off of stored sunlight, but utilize NEW sunlight. Physics, well, what hasn't physics done in the past century?

We are lucky enought to live right in the middle of all this. I don't know if there is a more exciting time to get into science. Not before our lifetimes. Maybe not after. We're standing on a giant ledge over a sea of possibility. We just have to jump in.

I remembered today why I used to love physics. During physics class today, Mr. Saddler was talking about how you can tell what kind of energy a system has just by a few variables. And with those few variables, you can tell just about anything about an object. In fact, back in the day, scientists used to think if you knew both the momentum and position of a particle, you could tell everything about it. Although we now know that's not true, you can still tell a whole lot about a particle via a few simple measurements and calculations. Amazing.

And that's the astounding thing about science. It's all about understanding the world around us more fully. It's its own form of "enlightenment," literally lighting ways into the darkness that we once didn't even know existed. Crap, why wouldn't you want to go into science?

Editor's Note: Note that I don't think everyone should go into science. I'm a big advocate of the "different strokes for different folks" view on life. There are some things I would never even consider pursuing as a career, and yet others find these fields fascinating. I realize that's how science is with some people. For weird, nerdy people like me, however, science is where it's at.