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Science Enchants the World
John Bedell
They
say that science disenchants the world. From Blake onward the
romantics, the sentimentalists, the mystics, and the faithful have
complained that the world of science is cold and ugly. But I don't find
that science robs the world of meaning, or makes it ugly. I find that
science makes the world more beautiful, more fantastic, more moving.
Science shows us flowers through butterfly eyes, revealing the patterns
our eyes can't see. Science shows us a trillion galaxies, with worlds
beyond counting. Science tells us about enormous beasts that once
roamed the earth. Science tells us about our own past, from our slow
struggle toward intelligence and speech to the vanished civilizations
of centuries past.
I
could take you to a place in Washington's Rock Creek Park, just a mile
from the White House. It is a little, steep-sided valley, with a
stream you can jump across winding across a level bottom no more than
fifty feet wide. It is shaded by trees neither remarkably old nor
particularly young. The stream flows over brown and white cobbles, and
the ground is covered with dead leaves. In places there are outcrops of
gray stone. There are houses not far away, and English ivy creeps down
the slopes into the woods. It is an unremarkable place, and most of the
people who drive by it every day have probably never noticed that it is
there.
But I have dug there, and found amazing things. There are
places in this valley where you are standing on four feet of artifacts
mixed with a little dirt. In one three by three foot test unit we found
2,000 objects, including hundreds of potsherds and 30 stone spear
points. The density of artifacts is far beyond anything I have seen elsewhere in twenty years of searching. We
found stone axes, scrapers, and knives, and one grinding stone more
than two feet long. The valley is not big enough for more than twenty
or so people to camp in at once, so this mass of material was not left
by a passing horde. It was left by small groups of people visiting year
after year from about 2200 BC to AD 1600. The visits
were particularly frequent during what we call the Middle Woodland
period, from about AD 300 to 1000. The distinctive pottery and spear
points made then are abundant in the soil. In that time the visitors were family groups. We know this
because they brought ceramic pots for cooking and stones for grinding
nuts, both jobs done by women, and stone dart points used by men to
hunt deer. They came in late fall or winter, when there were nuts to
grind and the little valley provided shelter from cold winds.
Through
the eyes of archaeology the valley is not a humdrum bit of green
space, but a watchtower with a view across 4,000 years. In the soil we
can see the rise and fall of cultures, the appearance of invaders from
the south and west, the discovery of new technologies. We can watch
people struggle to survive in a world very different from our own, when
satisfying hunger meant finding roots, catching a fish, or killing
a deer. Most societies before our time thought that their ancestors'
lives had been very much like their own. In medieval histories,
Alexander and Caesar are "great knights," and coats of arms were
invented for them. But thanks to research in a dozen fields, we know
how rich and varied the human experience has been. To us, history is
not more of the same stretching into the past, enlivened on occasion by
the intervention of gods remarkably like ourselves. It is an amazing
tale of how creative and diverse our species has been.
Other
scientists could tell you other stories about this place. A geologist
could tell you about a great mountain range that arose in the days of
the dinosaurs, whose remnants are the outcrops of gray rock in the
valley wall. He could tell you about the great floods that swept the
land when the glaciers melted, leaving behind the cobbles that fill the
stream bed. He could explain the other ways the land changed when the
ice melted, how the seas rose and drowned the river valleys, so that
tidal water reached all the way to Washington. In his stories the
solidity of the earth melts away, and it becomes a changeable thing,
each hill and valley the mark of some event in the near or distant past.
A
botanist could tell still more stories. She could point
out the rare plants most of us pass by without noticing. She could
explain how the landscape has changed since the European settlers
arrived, describe the plants that have disappeared, and show us
the invading plants that have taken their places. A zoologist could
find a hundred species of animals, a microbiologist many more. What
seems a little bit of woodland is really a fantastically complex
ecosystem, in which trees, shrubs, herbs, mammals, birds, amphibians,
molluscs, insects, worms, and smaller things all have their places. And
that is only the large scale of the world -- at the level of molecules,
life is even more astonishing in its complexity and cleverness.
When
the world seems featureless and plain, it is only our ignorance that
makes it so. When we can see all that is really there before us, even
an ordinary acre of woods become a place of wonders. Science enchants
the world.
December 28, 2008
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From
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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-- Carl Sagan
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