Thursday, March 27, 2008

Post of Dr.C.M.Nautiyal on "The Invisible Man"

I am happy as I find echo in what BKS jee wrote elsewhere (but before me).
A great German physicist bemoaned at the turn of 20th century syaing that he pitied the furture generation of physicists as everything had been discovered and nothing was left! Theory of Quantum and Relativity came after this!
President of the Royal Society ridiculed the efforts of poeple trying to talk of aircraft. It was end of the 19th century. He termed it foolish because nothng heavier than air could fly. In 1893, a few years after that, illiterate Wright brothers (bicycle mechanics) flew first plane! So BKS jee is very right that science doesn't know everything at least yet. We haven't even found the boundaries of science. So there are many issues which ought to be left open but this doesn't stop us to try to understand nature in a cause and effect framework.
Another thing we must appreciate is that even in science, we progress by going towards more and more general laws. At the end there is something which is hypothesis. But this hypothesis explains many things without invoking more hypotheses. We understand many phenomena by considering that gravity cause objects to attract each other. But why should matter have gravitational property? We don't know. However, by one single hypothesis, we are able to explain many things. Similarly classical mechanics explained many things. But then came the more generalised theory, relativity, of which classical mechanics was a special case.
But history tells us that science has been progressing as BKS jee also says. So may be with time we shall have better and better theories. I am not sure if the limitation is ours or of science at present.
Sometimes I feel that intuition is like analytical approach in intehration (integral calculus) while our, scientists' ,approach is like numerical integration. The numerical approach is somewhat clumsy, long, not 100 % accurate but suffices. But everyone doesn't have intuition so the clumsy approach is also needed.
Just like our audible range is ~20- 20 000 cycles/sec (Hz), bats may have extended range for sending and receiving. Rats and some others may have extended senses. Al explainable by science. A tweeter is richer on the high frequency side, the bigger speaker on the bass side. Man is not supriorin all respects.
As for the dreams, I have an alternative explanation based on selective memory. We remember only those dreams that turned out be true. Our subconcious mind remains active even when we appear to be sleeping. During that period, it makes infinite combinations of images, sound bites etc. experienced durin awakened atage. If something is remembered and an event tuerns out to be similar, we go on repating it to others as well as ourselves, again reinforcing it.
As for rebirth, I don't know of any well documented report, in a scientific manner. But will appreciate if some one can provide one.
Again, the right note to end at is: We still know too little. But must strive.

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