There is still room for discovery
The ascension of data and observation over theory and dogma was the tipping point between the medieval mind and the modern method, yet this never did resolve our basic human tendencies to remain in the past — committed to a world of our own implausible imagination.
Until four hundred years ago astronomers modeled the universe in profound ignorance of physical causality largely unaware of their charade and comfortable with every discrepancy. When resolving conflicts among theories and observations, they did so through slight-of-hand and selective omissions, treating their already questionable data as nettlesome rather than definitive. Superstition, dogma, and poppycock ruled that world — and anyone shining even the smallest ray of light onto their folly was quickly burned at the stake in one fashion or another.
Kepler put an end to this madness — or rather Kepler’s grave digging for ancient ‘science’ using data forged in Tycho’s observatories (celestial coordinates too meticulously collected to be adjusted apart from outright deceit).
In the centuries to follow, when data arrived from instrumentation, it would be collected and organized with diligence and examined for its natural agency. Gone were the angels pushing planets in their sacred circles. Gone was the need to say that something like gravity happens in each instance as a matter of devine will and outright intervention. Gone was the Universe created solely to our benefit — or created at all other than by the interplay of energy, particles, and natural forces.
Nowadays — in our so-called Age of Information — so much of that information pours into our lives that those peering at us from an earlier time might consider us omniscient gods for how much we could now discover if we were to make an honest study of it. Perhaps, though — even more likely — we might be viewed as demons for how ceaselessly we channel this wealth into self-serving misconceptions and spin-doctoring — cherry-picking free-standing facts and conscripting these into the service of message-making — filtering and freezing and forcing abundant knowledge into hideous shapes used to buttress the malarkey and sloganeering of present-day commerce and ideology.
Despite hundreds of years of empirical data and many generations into our age of reason, the ceaseless dissemination of present-day omissions and slight-of-hand continues to resurrect the medieval mind at every opportunity — helping it to claw its way back to the surface — aiding and abetting its shadowy and silent creep alongside our progressive society — whispering almost inaudibly to our most basic ill-founded hopes — that random events might just have an underlying purpose after all — that there might still be some wiggle room in the data allowing for deeply-felt superstitions — that shit really doesn’t just happen.
If Kepler were alive he would certainly recognize the undead face of this old charlatan and rebury the monster with whatever shovel he could find at hand.
Nonetheless — despite the ongoing malfeasance — we still have a Universe defying all intellectual dishonesty — daring us to further explain all types of nature as Tycho once dared the young Kepler to explain the orbit of Mars, and in so doing, compelled him to upend all of Western Thought.
As we consider the notion of discovery with so much data at our fingertips, only human nature — with its preference for the status quo — stands between us and the great discoveries awaiting those still willing to set aside their preconceptions — intellectually honest researchers and writers and leaders still willing to deal with the facts just as Kepler began doing four centuries ago.
