the power of doubt & imagination

Double shots of caffeine intake force me out of the bed rather early in the morning. A BBC program that I saw last night was aggressive enough to stay in my mind over night. It was titled - Science & Islam. There were a lot of thought provoking ideas in the program, one about how Science was and is driven my Money and Business. The presenter was passionately and strategically driving home his hypothesis that ancient Islamic astronomers and scientists doubted Ptolemy’s geo-centric theory long before Copernicus. Also that Copernicus used a lot of statistical data, which was collected over the life-times of many such scientists. Leaving alone the story of how these data in ancient Arabic texts travelled through the trade route of Venice to the western World, there are two things that amaze me here.

Firstly, the passion of the ancient astronomers of finding out the truth about the inter-related motion of the celestial bodies and trying to derive mathematical models to prove their respective theories. There was one who calculated the exact length of a year by studying the shadows casted by the sun, of an instrument, collecting data over 40 years. His result was within two minute precision of the modern day Gaussian year which is 365 days 6 hours 9 min 56 seconds . The additional hours are accounted for by an extra day every four years which we know as Leap year. The passion for accuracy goes to the extent of giving out a leap second every other year, like this one that just went by. And all this calculations in dates ranging as early as 2nd century AD, which is the amazing bit.

Secondly, what grows on me is the question about true purpose of education and knowledge. Researchers dedicating their whole lives to find out mysteries of nature, need a lot more than just doubt and knowledge. Which I'm sure is passion or thirst. May it be for truth or anything else. The way to satisfy this thirst may be life-time research based on their education & knowledge. Education is defined in Wikipedia as the learning of knowledge, information and skills during the course of life. This can be interpreted in various ways based on who’s interpreting it, which is true for any written literature. Thus stressing the importance of assimilation of ideas in the written form which becomes much more challenging when trying to assimilate imaginary ideas! Education injects the passion of learning and imagination. Ancient scientists didn’t have a common medium or even language to communicate, but shared the imagination. I used to find it really funny while learning geometry and chemistry in school, where we had to imagine a point in space or bonds between atoms which were unseen. I see them now, although imaginary. I guess learning never ends in life(s), whether one or many, real or imaginary.

Imagination, the power of thought!