issue 109 model essay
- Some people believe that scientific discoveries have given us a much better understanding of the world around us. Others believe that science has revealed to us that the world is infinitely more complex than we ever realised.
Write a response in which you discuss which view more closely aligns with your own position and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should address both of the views presented.
Do advances in scientific researches help us better understand the world we live in? Or are we increasingly perplexed by the new scientific knowledge constructed by the research community? The answers to these questions would depend on which groups of people we are talking about here. For the general public, science has provided solutions and resolved puzzles about the world we live in and enabled us to understand events in the world with confidence. For the scientific researchers, however, science is far less certain and settled, creating more complex puzzles than anyone can possibly solve completely.
There is no doubt that science has offered plausible explanations to many phenomena and events which used to confuse and intimidated people in the past. Take germ theory for example. Before the advent of germ theory, human beings did not understand why they got sick and often came up with bizarre theories and treatments which did more harm than good. Germ theory has greatly advanced our understanding of how and why people caught different diseases and more effective therapies had been developed as a result. Likewise, the discovery of relativity theories have enabled human beings to better understand how mass can be converted to nuclear energy. Such insights not only helped us to learn more about how energy was generated in the sun. They also created new opportunities for us to harness nuclear energy.
In addition to natural science, social sciences also brought the public many new knowledge about how the society worked. Microeconomic theories, for example, have been developed to explain and predict human behaviours in a wide range of contexts. Through the quantitative analysis of a large amount of data about drivers’ behaviours before and after the introduction seatbelt laws, economists have learned that while seatbelt laws may provided extra protection for drivers and passengers, more pedestrians had been killed as drivers tended to drive less cautiously with the protection of seat belts. Such insights from social science carry important implications for the relevant social and legal policies and contributed to our understanding of the society.
*While theoretical insights from both natural and social sciences have greatly advanced the public understanding of the natural world and the human society, the frontier researchers in sciences are far less certain about the world as they know it. When it comes to the cutting-edge research areas, the well-established theories may not be very useful in explaining the empirical observations. For example, theoretical physicists have long struggled to unify the theory of general relativity that offers elegant explanation for the world at the macro level with the theory of quantum mechanics that is more applicable to the micro world. Economists also find it difficult to explain why free markets could fail soundly to rescue the developed world from periodic financial crisis and why less liberal economies such as China seem to be more robust than its more democratic counterparts like India. To explain the empirical observations that may challenge the existing theories, scientists have to search for new theories constantly and be prepared to be challenged with even more empirical data.
- In conclusion, as members of the general public, we are lucky to live in this scientifically and technologically advanced world where most phenomena can be adequately explained by experts in the respective scientific fields. But members of the scientific research community have a long way to go for developing a set of comprehensive theories that can settle most, if not all, puzzles in the world.