Humans are curious, like monkeys. People can be fascinated by the past to give a sense of closure of who we are on this planet. Many feel that unlocking our past can open many doors to the future. This brings us to the word science. Science is understood as a body of knowledge and process, making predictions about the world in such a way that they are testable. Now science does help us detect our curiosity about how the world develops and works. However, Science fiction opens our eyes to a bigger picture of our world giving us humans a sense of the real world and a perspective we would have never imagined. It makes us really think about what the world really is today and how it could possibly be in the near future with scientific theories. For example, when we look into the term Aforfutorism, Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” (1994) he describes the term as a “speculative fiction that treats African American theme and addresses concerns in the context of the 20th-century technoculture that appropriates images of technology and prosthetically enhanced future.”(Dery 180). Afrofuturism uses science fiction to make sense of the past, present, and future of African Americans. This is why science fiction can give us a true meaning of the world and what it could become. As stated by Isaac Asimov “Science-fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings.”(Asimov 148). Science fiction gives us humans an understanding of what is happening to us in the world today but not directly saying it, tying it to real science.
There are three texts that certainly implicate science to add to our understanding of the world. In their essay “The (Elusive) Theory of Everything” Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow explain that there is not an ultimate theory of everything but multiple theories that stop us from knowing the meaning of reality. Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman reveal in “Our Place in the Universe” that it would be foolish that we could hope to understand what happened on earth before our arrival. Last, Stephen Jay Gould evaluates the difference between science and speculation, presenting how the extinction of dinosaurs occurred; in his writing “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs”. However, Science might give us a scientific understanding of the universe but how do we know if it holds our true meaning of what reality is to us. Resulting in tying our human self to a fantasy that is only real in one’s mind. “Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible” (“The Fugitive”). When science seems unclear we may turn to what could be real in our universe internally.
Many theories out in the world tell us what to believe and what to not believe, but “not knowing” what is true or false can keep you clueless to what’s the real understanding of the universe. Gould explains what science is all about defining it as a “fruitful mode of Inquiry”. It’s not just a statement or an idea being said but something that is can be proven true. “Science works with testable proposals. If after much compilation and scrutiny of data, new information continues to affirm a hypothesis, we may accept its provisionally and gain confidence as further evidence mounts. We can never be completely sure that a hypothesis is right, though we may be able to show it is wrong.”(Gould,488). Science is not just something that is being hypothesized but is something that holds truth behind it with evidence. That can allow us, humans, to acknowledge the real meaning of what the universe is for us. Furthermore, Lightman introduces Garth Illingworth, an astronomer who studies galaxies. Illingworth states, “I think: By God, we are studying things that we can never physically touch. We sit on this miserable little planet in a midsize galaxy and we can characterize most of the universe. It is astonishing to me, the immensity of the situation, and how to relate to it in terms we can understand.”(Lightman,504). This illustrates that what we’re scientifically acknowledging is something we might never really know about unless we are physically there. Something we didn’t live through, how do we know it’s true? Well, evidence can bring us a better understanding of what’s significant holds the universe. Ultimately, scientific ideas must not only be testable but must be tested, mainly with many different lines of evidence. Evidence not only is the heart of all science but it influences our thought, ideas, and actions in our life. Science is needed to understand what to know and can be known. It expands our minds about the universe and how it will affect us in the near future. Gould and Lightman give us an overall meaning of what should be perceived in our minds. Even though we’re not able to physically see, touch, or not know what happened, we can scientifically prove events that occurred with tests; tests that can shape our place in a universe so big.
With this purpose in mind, everything experienced whether it’s something you see, hear, or touch in any way determines a person as a whole. We, humans, create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe that our minds identify is an image of ourself as an individual. Hawking and Mlodinow talk about an American psychologist Timothy Leary explaining his conception that reality is only the image the perceiver builds upon in their consciousness. Leary ideas applied to another conception anti-realism, instrumentalism, or idealism. They state “According to the doctrine, the world we know is constructed by the human mind employing sensory data as its raw material and is shaped by the interpretive structure of our brain. This viewpoint may be hard to accept, but it is not difficult to understand. There is no way to remove the observer-us-from our perception of the world.”(Hawking & Mlodinow,483). The way our mind perceives the world is a perception of reality. Only a person can define their reality. One’s reality is what creates meaning in our life. And by changing meaning and perspective, we change reality. We look through the world with our filtered lens and see only what we want to see. Many centuries of physicist thoughts and conceptions have passed giving us an idea of what is the universe we live in. but these misconceptions do not intervene with what our subconscious believes.
Additionally, Hawking and Mlodinow include the consumption of quantum mechanics and how it shaped the conception of reality. In a quantum world, particles don’t have a definite or a definite velocity until they have been observed. In their writing, they state that “ In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.”(Hawking & Mlodinow, 484). They are trying to argue that it doesn’t matter what is real and what isn’t, all that matters is what we experience in reality in the light of quantum mechanics. For example, Hawking and Mlodinow talk about the film The Matrix. The people are living in a world of virtual, and as long they didn’t know if they had no reason to challenge the world. The goldfish in a curved bowl is another example as well. The fish would experience the curvature of light as its reality and while it won’t be true to someone outside the bowl, to the fish it is.
Giving These points, we observe what we want to acknowledge in our mind. Science fiction has us imagine our place in the universe. It’s a way of exploring how we fit into the bigger scheme of things. When we think of science fiction we may think of the real world but with an illusion. “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science)” (Aldiss 8). It’s an escape to the reality that helps us see what the universe is through imagination but with real issues in science.
Work Cited
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, “The (Elusive) Theory of Everything,” pp.483-87
Stephen Jay Gould, “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,”pp. 488-94
Alan Lightman, “Our Place in the Universe.”pp.500-08
“The Fugitive.” The Twilight Zone. Writ. Charles Beaumont. Dir. Richard L. Bare. CBS, 1962. Web.
Asimov, Isaac. “Other Worlds to Conquer.” The Writer, vol. 64, issue 5, May 1951, pp. 148-151.
Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday, 1973.
Dery, Mark. (1994). “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” (FLAME WARS: THE DISCOURSE OF CYBERCULTURE)
