Science always has its way of telling people that they
are not right. Every nation invests heavily in science. They talk a lot about
basic sciences and the importance it should have in every country's schooling
system. For me science is, was and never will be my life. It’s just a way of
knowledge acquisition.
Just because I have a good data from my experiments, I
cannot say that the painting on the wall is flawed. The same applies to the
artist as well, who cannot comment on the significance or relevance of my data
to the current scientific trends. Painting is his way of acquiring knowledge,
so is science for me.
We as humans, always seek for truth. Though, I should
accept we all speak and enjoy the lies around us every day. We personally do
seek the truth at some point. What starts as a fascination always ends with
something simple and right under our eye. At times fascination for whatever we
do, obscures the real picture of what is happening and hence increases our time
to understand it. We are trained such that, if something is hard to understand,
it is deemed complex.
Complexity in any field arises primarily because of
our fascination for it. This makes us imagine that what we are doing indeed is
big and astounding. However, it’s not as astounding as we imagine it to be.
Being fascinated is easy, seeing things as they are indeed is tough.
One standing example of being simple yet complex,
which I encounter every day is a cell. It’s in the size of a micron, yet it
takes a full period of our natural lives trying to understand an
extraordinarily meager part of it. This is due to our fascination for them. It
is fascinating because it has both simplicity and complexity in equal
proportions. There is absolutely no part of it wherein one attribute is higher
or lesser.
Think of all the things that we are fascinated by. It
would essentially be an equal mixture of simplicity and complexity. Power of
love, hate, science, Human body... be it anything that fascinates essentially
has these two ingredients in it, in equal proportions.
As with my initial phrase of discussion, science is
fascinating for me as it’s both simple and complex.
Those who see the simpler phase of it becomes a
philosopher and those who see the complex side of it become scientists. As I
write this article, I stand on the crossroads wondering which path to take, as
both will lead me to a higher truth.
For those of you who read this and wonder just as me,
you might want to take the one less traveled.
So which one of the two road is less traveled?
A fascinating question again is it?
With love from Chennai.
