To explore and exper­i­ment with the relation­ship between science and technology, I offer an imagi­nary scenario. A young boy who goes by the name of Harry Potter raises a small brown stick, points it towards a candle and utters an audible sound. Almost immedi­ately following the utter­ance, a strange green light emanates from the tip of the stick that is facing away from the boy. This strange light travels in an almost linear fashion towards the candle, and the wick of the candle bursts into flames.

Anyone familiar with Joanne Rowling’s works might immedi­ately exclaim that Harry Potter was performing magic, but the truth is, this was a simple voice-activated electronic device that would emit a high-power laser beam from its tip when the right voice-command was issued. A device that a 21^st century individual would call the product of ‘modern technology’. Can we really differ­en­tiate between technology and magic?

To suggest a loose defin­i­tion, technology is something that simply works, like a tool that does the job that it was meant to do. It has little to do with why the tool works, or how it works. Science, on the other hand, explores the cause-and-effect relation­ship that defines and supports technology. In the above narra­tive, did the sound of the boy’s voice really trigger the emission of light from the ‘wand’? Or was it perhaps programmed to do so at that partic­ular instant, and acted indepen­dently of the command issued? Was it the light that led to the creation of flames? Did the ‘wand’ emit the light, or was the light ‘drawn out’ from the wand by the force of the candle? As you can see, there are many ways of looking at a simple situation.

It is neces­sary to realise that every­thing that is scien­tific must be a theory, because a scien­tific fact would, by its own virtue, be immune to challenge by any scien­tific theory, thereby negating the very scien­tific method that it was suppos­edly derived from. The sun rising in the east may be consid­ered a fact, but there is a possi­bility that humans are under a common mass-hallucination that dupes them into believing this. The fact that this is not very probable is besides the point. If a new discovery were to suggest the we are indeed being deceived, science must be willing to recon­sider estab­lished ideas and concepts in order to place them in a new perspective.

The impor­tant idea here is that such a discovery would not radically alter our technology, because what worked yesterday would still work today, and there is a very good chance that it will continue to function perfectly tomorrow, even in the light of our disil­lu­sion­ment. Fire, the combus­tion of certain substances in the presence of oxygen, is technology, because even people from the Stone Age cooked food and kept away wild beasts with its help. This did not require knowl­edge of the elemental consti­tu­tion of air, or the nature of the myste­rious yellow substance that we call a ‘flame’. It is quite likely that the inven­tion of fire was a product of chance, as were many other inven­tions and discov­eries. To early humans living in caves, fire must have seemed like magic, but to us, it is technology.

Of course, it is science that dictates how we should use technology. With science, we can refine technology to our needs; knowing why the tool works, we can make it better. Even so, there are factors that cannot be taken into account, unknown variables in equations that are not fully under­stood. Where science fails, the success of technology becomes unpre­dictable. The fact that science can never be completely and compre­hen­sively right implies that technology will always retain a little bit of magic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 10:31 and is filed under Daily Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.