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LitCharts | October 12 2024
The Scientific Revolution’s feedback loop. Science needs more than just research to make progress. It depends on the mutual reinforcement of science, politics and economics. Political and economic institutions provide the resources without which scientific research is almost impossible. In return, scientific research provides new powers that are used to obtain new resources.
The Scientific Revolution, Harari explains, was unique in its approach to understanding the world. Science is based on the ideas that humans don’t know the rules, they must discover them by observation, and they can use these insights to gain power. Harari thinks earlier traditions (like religions) claimed to know the important things about the world, and that humans could learn those things by reading ancient texts like the Bible or the Qur’an. Modern-day science, in contrast, assumes that humans don’t know what’s important about the world. Harari thinks that Darwin, for example, didn’t claim to “solve the riddle of life once and for all.” Today’s scientific theories also often conflict and compete with each other.
Harari thinks many scientific theories are taken as true, but everyone still agrees that new evidence might prove them false. He thinks science has given humanity the tools to create many new technologies, but it presents humanity with a new problem. Myths have held societies together and made humans cooperate for millennia, but science tells humans not to believe them. Harari thinks this means that people who want to stabilize societies either have to claim that a scientific theory is the absolute truth, or they ignore science and live with a different conception of absolute truth. Harari thinks modern social orders are held together by a “an almost religious belief” in technology and scientific research.
The world has changed dramatically in the last 500 years. A modern battleship could shred Columbus’s ships in a matter of seconds. A single computer can store all the data from the medieval world with room to spare. In 1500, cities averaged 100,000 residents; today, they house millions. Scientists in 1600 didn’t know anything about microbes. Harari thinks the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945 was the most important moment in this 500-year history. All these changes, Harari thinks, happened because of the Scientific Revolution. He argues that in the last 500 years, humans have increasingly put their faith in scientific research, and he wonders why.
Scientific research was central to World War I, as governments funded research into aircrafts, poisons, tanks, and guns. In World War II, German, American, British, and Soviet governments thought they could win the war when they had new technology. When the Americans invented the atomic bomb and detonated it in Japan, the Japanese surrendered and the war was over. Today, people think that terrorism can be solved with nanotechnology like “bionic spy-flies.” Harari even wonders if scientists are developing brain scanners that can detect hateful thoughts in people’s minds.
German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war.
According to Harari , science combines empirical observations about the world with mathematical tools. He thinks people tend to disregard old knowledge and focus on looking for new evidence from the world instead. But to Harari, observations aren’t knowledge. Observations have to be described by theories. He thinks older traditions also formulated theories, that they told as stories. Modern science, in contrast, formulates theories in the language of mathematics. The Bible and the Qur’an didn’t have equations and graphs, but they still articulated general laws about the world. When Isaac Newton published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, he did the same thing, but he used mathematics.
Benjamin Franklin disarming the gods.
Here, Harari wants to show that advances in science have been centered on prolonging life for quite some time. He uses the example of King Edward and Queen Eleanor to show that scientists have progressed leaps and bounds in that effort—the level of child mortality that humanity’s wealthiest rulers endured less than 900 years ago is unimaginable to a modern human being. Harari wants to stress that scientists are closing on their goal to extend human life—and he worries that it's happening so quickly that humanity hasn’t really spent much time thinking about whether or not that’s a good thing.
Many modern humans assume that science and technology can solve all of humanity’s problems, but Harari doesn’t think that science isn’t some special, superior enterprise. He thinks that—like all cultural practices—it’s shaped by other interests. Harari thinks about how expensive science is. Without extensive financing, he says, many scientific discoveries would never have happened. He thinks it’s naïve to believe in “pure science” for the sake of science. People fund research because they want to achieve a political, economic, or religious goal. In the 16th century, for example, kings financed geographical expeditions so that they could conquer new territory.
Harari thinks it would be impossible to remove outside interests from the scientific endeavor. There are always scientists with different research programs competing for funding, and somebody has to decide which program to choose. Harari strongly believes that there are always political, economic, or religious motivations behind such choices. If a society values milk production, it’s unlikely to fund research into the mental anguish of calves being separated from their mothers. He thinks, in fact, that science can never set its own agenda. So, he decides to look at capitalism and imperialism next, to see how they affect scientific progress.
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