Which is the purest science?
21:01
Rutherford is known for many things, most importantly his act of splitting the atom. It was a revelation. The un-splittable, had been split. Rutherford had seen into the very eyes of god. Stared for seconds, before god left. But he said something in subsequence.
“All of science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
Stamp collecting. Bug naming. Taxonomy.
Taxonomy is the act of giving names to entities based on their superficial qualities.
Bug naming is fundamentally biology.
Biology. The study of life as we know it. Beautiful and infinitely complex. But at its core, all of biology can be explained by simple chemical reactions in small simple systems.
Chemistry. The science of matter. Unpredictable, deals directly with the devil that are the building blocks of all things.
A simple exchange of electrons. All of chemistry.
Physics then? Possibly.
You know there is this part of physics that is fondly called the ‘Standard Model’. The theory of physics, arguably the most successful theory of mankind. The purely mathematical equations that has stood strong, with exhaustive amounts of experimental data that it predicts with inhumanly stellar precision. It goes to the bottom. Right down to why everything does what it does. Ignoring its failure to explain gravity, it is an incredible feat of human thought.
So yes, physics is the purest science. Things do not get deeper than that.
Or do they?
Physics explains the experimental data. It shows us the symmetry. The equity. The beauty.
But it doesn’t explain it.
Why does a particle also behave like a wave?
Why does a charge an opposite charge cancel out? The fundamental questions. The questions that we pay so little attention to, the idea that their answers could be anything more than blatant assumptions is unimaginable.
Is physics the purest science?
Yes.
Is it pure enough?
No.
1 comments
Really well written!
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