David Peat

208 From Certainty to UncertaintyThe Science StoryBefore we leave this issue of reading let us turn to another type ofstory—science itself. Science is that story our society tells itself aboutthe cosmos. Science supposedly provides an objective account of thematerial world based upon measurement and quantification so thatstructure, process, movement, and transformation can be describedmathematically in terms of fundamental laws.Science proceeds by abstracting what is essential from the accidentaldetails of matter and process. When Newton’s apple falls it doesn’tmatter if it is ripe or green, a golden delicious or a Cox’s orange pippin.Such qualities do not concern a science that prides itself on being valuefree. It does not matter if the person who measures the conductivity ofcopper, or the refractive index of quartz, is a Hindu, a born again Christian,or a staunch atheist. Neither does it matter if this experiment iscarried out in a laboratory in Moscow, Delhi, or Chicago—the resultwill always be the same. Einstein’s famous theory of relativity statesthat while phenomena appear different to someone close to a blackhole, traveling close to the speed of light, or in a falling elevator here onearth, scientists in profoundly different environments will neverthelessalways discover the same underlying laws of nature.In this sense science appears to stand outside our earlier discussionof creative readings within a social and cultural context. Scienceasserts that the answers nature provides are independent of culture,belief, and personal values. Cultural relativism, it argues, has no placein science.Certain aspects of this claim on the part of science may well betrue but they miss an essential point. Science begins with our relationshipto nature. The facts it discovers about the universe are answers tohuman questions and involve human-designed experiments. The Westernscientific approach, for example, places nature in a series of highlyartificial situations and demands that answers are given quantitatively—interms of number.Other societies, had they developed a strong science of matter andan associated technology, may have had quite a different relationshipto the natural world. In turn, they would have asked other sorts of