The idea of understanding the universe and all of its' glories has long been the aim of mankind. The great Egyptian civilisations made use of astrology and architecture to try to understand their place in the universe and their interactions with their Gods. This can be seen in the ceremonial preperations for burial of corpses, the stories highlighted in the pyramid and coffin texts and the development of monotheism during the Amarna period. There was a constant questing for an understanding of the infinite throughout the pharonic ages right up to the Ptolomeic period of Greek occupation and indeed one of the best references to this quest comes to us from Solon of Aexandria, a Greek incomer who attempted as part of the library project to collate all of the Egyptian thoughts and stories of the infite. It has been suggested that it was from these sources that Solon came to understand the stories of Atlantis later made infamous by Plato in his discourses.
The quest for knowledge proceeded apace through the Greek and Roman empires with the development and refinement of mathematical and philosophical thought and the application of hard logic. This blended with the spirituality of the time to create myths and Gods that represented the quest for wisdom as a search for knowledge from the universe itself. As Christianity began to take hold during the Roman period there was a branch of that faith which focused on the aquisition and understanding of knowledge as being an integral part of approaxching divinity. This was Gnosticism and came out of a Greek tradition that suggested that to understand and therefore move closer to divinity it was necessary to learn more and understand more about the World. Gnosticism lost out to the more esoteric branches of Christianity, but the desire to know GOd through scientific understanding of Gods creations is a tradition that has continued through the Catholic church to the present day.
Throughout the intervening period there have been traditions wherein knowledge and understand were crucial to the development of society. The Islamic world of the 8th to the 12th century had a tremendous focus on understanding and much of what we now consider to be core to our scientific development in mathematics and physics has come down to us from this period. Similarly in the far East, practical philosophers made tremendous advances in chemistry, and the mugal empire of India developed on these these.discoveries and developed them further. Through trade and exploration these ideas came back to Europe and formed the basis of the enlightenment movement through Italy and France at the same time as the Germanic nations and England began to industrialise with all of the scientific developments that that brought.
During these periods the theme was for the great thinkers of the ages to be polymaths, following multiple lines of enquiry concurrently through multiple disciplines and techniques. In more recent times as we moved into the 19th Century there was a movement away from this strategy towards far more specialism, highlighted by the development of highly specialised areas of study and the differentiation of natural philosophy into its component areas of chemistry, biology and physics. In my opinion this is one of the primary reasons that a unified theory is still little more than a pipedream. The recent advances in physics have been very impressive with the work on the quantum world, chaos theory, string theory and the like beginning to get to grips with the substance of the universe, but I feel that there must be a place for re-integrating the disparate strands of research and thought in order to achieve mankinds ultimate goal of complete understanding.
Harmony is the goal, understanding is the path, endeavour is the journey....
No comments:
Post a Comment