Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Readers Are Plentiful; Thinkers Are Rare

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

-Arisotle

Before Aristotle, with his sheer brilliance, came up with the idea that Earth is in fact round, people believed that earth was flat. And then Ptolemy came up with the idea that Earth is the centre of the universe. Then it was the turn of Copernicus to state that the Sun is at the centre and planets revolve round the sun, shattering all the earlier theories to pieces. Then followed Galileo and Newton, each one of them proving a new theory, thereby confuting all prior beliefs.What if someday in the future, some intelligent scientist comes up with a new theory disproving all the facts we believe to be true? Then, there won't be anything called the gravitational force or quantum mechanics.Bodies don't attract each other. Neither is the Big Bang true. Space time correlation does not apply. Sure there is going to be someday, when the basic thing we believe to be true is going to be proved false. So, is it better not to believe in any theories that currently exist? Maybe we can prove more facts if we don't believe in already proven facts. If Aristotle believed that earth was flat, he might have never discovered that Earth is in fact round.