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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
The continuity between atomic physics, molecular chemistry,
and that holy of holies, the nature of reproduction and heredity,
has now been established. No new principle of science need be
invoked. It looks as if there are a small number of simple facts that
can be used to understand the enormous intricacy and variety of
living things. (Molecular genetics also teaches that each organism
has its own particularity.)
Reductionism is even better established in physics and chemistry.
I will later describe the unexpected coalescence of our
understanding of electricity, magnetism, light and relativity into a
single framework. We've known for centuries that a handful of
comparatively simple laws not only explains but quantitatively and
accurately predicts a breathtaking variety of phenomena, not just
on Earth but through the entire Universe.
We hear - for example from the theologian Langdon Gilkey in
his Nature, Reality and the Sacred - that the notion of the laws of
Nature being everywhere the same is simply a preconception
imposed on the Universe by fallible scientists and their social
milieu. He longs for other kinds of 'knowledge', as valid in their
contexts as science is in its. But the order of the Universe is not an
assumption; it's an observed fact. We detect the light from distant
quasars only because the laws of electromagnetism are the same
ten billion light years away as here. The spectra of those quasars
are recognizable only because the same chemical elements are
present there as here, and because the same laws of quantum
mechanics apply. The motion of galaxies around one another
follows familiar Newtonian gravity. Gravitational lenses and
binary pulsar spin-downs reveal general relativity in the depths of
space. We could have lived in a Universe with different laws in
every province, but we do not. This fact cannot but elicit feelings
of reverence and awe.
We might have lived in a Universe in which nothing could be
understood by a few simple laws, in which Nature was complex
beyond our abilities to understand, in which laws that apply on
Earth are invalid on Mars, or in a distant quasar. But the evidence
- not the preconceptions, the evidence - proves otherwise.
Luckily for us, we live in a Universe in which much can be
'reduced' to a small number of comparatively simple laws of
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