Life in the Rear-view Mirror

Scientific Revolution

The technology revolution was spawned by the scientific breakthroughs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Physics and mathematics were brought together by brilliant scientists to give us a clearer picture of the forces of nature and the Universe.

We had Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic waves that is the basis for all modern communication systems. Then we had Einstein’s theory of relativity that gave us warped space and the potential for time travel, which filmmakers used to bring us movies like Back to the Future (1985) and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). Moreover, he gave us E=mc2, the equation that says mass can be converted into energy and vice versa, which paved the way for nuclear power and nuclear-generated electricity.

Then came the Big Bang theory of the universe, which dispelled all creation myths in one fell swoop, and the Standard Model of Quantum Physics, which explains all the fundamental particles, or building blocks, of our universe. The former has had profound changes in the religiosity of people, but this will be the subject of another chapter.

Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest, astronomer, and university professor, postulated the Big Bang Theory, in 1931. Ironically, it took a priest to remove God from the creation myth! The theory gives us an expanding universe that started from a miniscule amount of mass, called the primeval atom or cosmic egg, exploding at the moment of creation, 13.7 billion years ago. More recently, the Hubble space telescope, launched in 1990, gave astronomers numerous details of the universe, all of them consistent with the Big Bang Theory.

The last one is String Theory, or the so-called theory of everything, because it not only applies to the microscopic world of the atom, but also to the macroscopic world of the universe. It’s like unifying the Standard Model and the Big Bang Theory. The essence of String Theory is that all fundamental particles of nature are nothing more than infinitesimally small vibrating strings, each with different vibrations, which gives them different properties and characteristics. In a modified version, membranes replace the strings and the name changes to Membrane Theory, but the concept remains the same.

The most exciting news of the 21st century was the experimental confirmation of the so-called Higgs Boson, an infinitesimally small particle predicted by the Standard Model, but first theorized in 1964 by six physicists, of which Higgs was one. Its verification came at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland, in 2013, and further validates both the Standard Model and the Big Bang Theory.

These scientific developments have had a profound effect on society and religious beliefs. Because of that, even as evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory mounts, the Church, a non-scientific organization, came up with its own theory, which they called Intelligent Design. Fortunately, the scientific community was successful in preventing this theory from being taught in schools as science. There is no room and no need for religion in science. That’s the beauty of science: it searches for the truth.

Almost for sure, the Big Bang Theory will be refined, just as Einstein refined Newton’s Theory of Gravitation, but like gravity, it’s here to stay. Science is based on fact, while religion is based on myth. Science exposes myth like light exposes darkness. The truth always prevails, and Intelligent Design will replace neither Darwin’s theory of evolution nor the Big Bang Theory.

The scientific revolution changed the way we think and perceive things; and for this reason, it has had, and continues to have, a much more profound and long-lasting impact on society than the technological revolution.

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