Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Newton's Sleep
it is the inalterable and inerrant word of God that the Universe is a
few thousand years old, then scientists are being offensive and
impious, as well as mistaken, when they claim it's a few billion.
Irritatingly, science claims to set limits on what we can do, even
in principle. Who says we can't travel faster than light? They used
to say that about sound, didn't they? Who's going to stop us, if we
have really powerful instruments, from measuring the position
and the momentum of an electron simultaneously? Why can't we,
if we're very clever, build a perpetual motion machine 'of the first
kind' (one that generates more energy than is supplied to it), or a
perpetual motion machine 'of the second kind' (one that never
runs down)? Who dares to set limits on human ingenuity?
In fact, Nature does. In fact, a fairly comprehensive and very
brief statement of the laws of Nature, of how the Universe works,
is contained in just such a list of prohibited acts. Tellingly,
pseudoscience and superstition tend to recognize no constraints in
Nature. Instead, 'all things are possible'. They promise a limitless
production budget, however often their adherents have been
disappointed and betrayed.
A related complaint is that science is too simple-minded, too
'reductionist'; it naively imagines that in the final accounting there
will be only a few laws of Nature - perhaps even rather simple
ones - that explain everything, that the exquisite subtlety of the
world, all the snow crystals, spiderweb latticework, spiral galaxies,
and flashes of human insight can ultimately be 'reduced' to
such laws. Reductionism seems to pay insufficient respect to the
complexity of the Universe. It appears to some as a curious hybrid
of arrogance and intellectual laziness.
To Isaac Newton - who in the minds of critics of science
personifies 'single vision' - it looked like a clockwork Universe.
Literally. The regular, predictable orbital motions of the planets
around the Sun, or the Moon around the Earth, were described to
high precision by essentially the same differential equation that
predicts the swing of a pendulum or the oscillation of a spring. We
have a tendency today to think we occupy some exalted vantage
point, and to pity the poor Newtonians for having so limited a
world view. But within certain reasonable limitations, the same
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