Read Letters to a Young Scientist for Free Online Page A

philosophy. It is as follows: Can this consilience—connections made between widely separated bodies of knowledge—be extended to the social sciences and humanities, including even the creative arts? I think it can, and further I believe that the attempt to make such linkages will be a key part of intellectual life in the remainder of the twenty-first century.
    Why do I and others think in this controversial manner? Because science is the wellspring of modern civilization. It is not just “another way of knowing,” to be equated with religion or transcendental meditation. It takes nothing away from the genius of the humanities, including the creative arts. Instead it offers ways to add to their content. The scientific method has been consistently better than religious beliefs in explaining the origin and meaning of humanity. The creation stories of organized religions, like science, propose to explain the origin of the world, the content of the celestial sphere, and even the nature of time and space. These mythic accounts, based mostly on the dreams and epiphanies of ancient prophets, vary from one religion’s belief to another. Colorful they are, and comforting to the minds of believers, but each contradicts all the others. And when tested in the real world they have so far proved wrong, always wrong.
    The failure of the creation stories is further evidence that the mysteries of the universe and the human mind cannot be solved by unaided intuition. The scientific method alone has liberated humanity from the narrow sensory world bequeathed it by our prehuman ancestors. Once upon a time humans believed that light allowed them to see everything. Now we know that the visual spectrum, which activates the visual cortex of the brain, is only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, where the frequencies range across many orders of magnitude, from those of extreme high-frequency gamma rays at one end to those at the extreme low-frequency radiation at the other. The analysis of the electromagnetic spectrum has led to an understanding of the true nature of light. Knowledge of its totality has made possible countless advances in science and technology.
    Once people thought that Earth was the center of the universe and lay flat and unmoving while the sun rotated around it. Now we know that the sun is a star, one of two hundred million in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most hold planets in their gravitational thrall, and many of these almost certainly resemble Earth. Do the Earthlike planets also harbor life? Probably, in my opinion, and, thanks to the scientific method, furnished with improved optics and spectroscopic analyses, we will know in a short time.
    Once it was believed that the human race arose full-blown in its present form as a supernatural event. Now we understand, in sharp contrast, that our species descended over six million years from African apes that were also the ancestors of modern chimpanzees.
    As Freud once remarked, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth is not at the center of the universe, Darwin that we are not the center of life, and he, Freud, that we are not even in control of our own minds. Of course, the great psychoanalyst must share credit with Darwin, among others, but the point is correct that the conscious mind is only part of the thinking process.
    Overall, through science we have begun to answer in a more consistent and convincing way two of the great and simple questions of religion and philosophy: Where do we come from? and, What are we? Of course, organized religion claims to have answered these questions long ago, using supernatural creation stories. You might then well ask, can a religious believer who accepts one such story still do good science? Of course he can. But he will be forced to split his worldview into two domains, one secular and the other supernatural, and stay within the secular domain as he works. It would not be difficult for him to find endeavors in scientific research that have