Scientific openness...

We talk a lot about having an opened mind, having a transparent government, striving for an open society and the list for openness goes on. Yes, transparency and openness are not actually synonyms but they are degrees of openness itself. Something which is transparent doesn't mean that it is open to everyone and it holds good for a few scenarios, such as the government where a lot of intelligence reports and other high security information are maintained; and it is justifiable. But sometimes absolute openness is essential. 

Sometimes, human evolution doesn't go forward, one such area is knowledge sharing. One aspect we humans pride over other living creatures is the collective knowledge which we have accumulated over the past thousands of years. For example, making fire wasn't just learnt and forgotten but it was just passed on and on and even till this very day, we use the same cave man technology to create fire using abrasives. These are very different from protective instincts which is also kind of genetically driven like a mice being scared of a cat (like human beings afraid of lizards and cockroaches :P :P) but this is not knowledge.

When humans started to accumulate knowledge 1000s of years ago, they were very open, they drew/ wrote on walls and just passed the knowledge to everyone. In the times of the great scholars of the Greek and Roman Empire a lot of philosophers though scholarly, took to the general public to profess their knowledge and ideas. As centuries went by, the scholarly started to isolate themselves from the society and started to form their own class ignoring the others. This led to a certain drift and the bridge of knowledge transfer between the scholarly and a general public started to crumble. There has been a great deterioration in this process from a day where scholars were the once who were able to explain big science to common man; to this day were scholars are the ones who talk with scientific jargon which the general public could never understand.

There has also been a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is treated, from the days when science was free and just pure knowledge to a day when everything in science means money and business. I read this title somewhere but it hits the bull’s eye, “Knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted”. Today, when more than 60% of the world earns less than 2USD per day, an average scientific article could cost around 10-20 USD. We are talking about knowledge explosion and all those things these days but; in reality it is knowledge implosion. We generate so much knowledge but we prohibit people from reading it and just because it is not open to everyone, the knowledge which is generated is just becoming obsolete and useless.

This cocoon which someone initiated thinking that a butterfly will eventually fly out of it one day, is strangling the same beautiful creature to death. There are some positive signs though in the recent past, leading scientist have come out in favor of openness and are pushing for greater knowledge sharing. They have created platforms of open access of scientific articles and a lot more people have started to appreciate the fact of openness. The irony in this is, we receive the money to do research from the general public in the form of taxes but totally shield them from the knowledge we generate out their hard earned money. Thus far except the warriors of open access, the larger scientific community has been silent spectator on this sad truth.  

The illusion of every moment

Life is a marvelous gift; if there could be a better gift than our life itself is our perception. We live our lives at a pace where, we are unable to really enjoy living our lives and rare so appreciate the power of our human perception. It is how we perceive things really drives our day today living. It starts with thinking its 10 am in the morning when you wake up but when it’s hardly 9am to thinking that a stranger you just met might have a crush on you.  It all lies in the power of our brain and the complex biochemistry (which no one really understands) which drives this 1500g of crazy stuff inside the skull making us the dominant beings on the blue planet (or this is how we at least perceive human being as).

Let me start by just giving you a simple explanation of the complexity of perception. Once, I and a friend of mine were deeply introspecting on our mere existence; he brought up the point of perception. He explained it this way, “When we are young, we are shown different colors on a board and pointing at specific shaped objects which scientifically have different wavelengths are taught this is red, blue and green and so on. How can we be so sure that the red color which the teacher is pointing out and telling is red is the same color the student is seeing through is eyes?  What if he sees it as some other color and perceives it as red? “. Of course, we have scientific explanations to colors, like red is 625 (nanometer) nm and so on but still, how can we be sure what the other person’s brain is seeing when showing him/her a picture which absorbs just 625 nm wavelength light?  He can just be seeing the 625 nm as a totally different color and believe all his/her life that it’s red.

This illusion of perception has been the basis of many ideas and theories but more often than not these were just far away from the common man and his day to life. But the fact is, it actually is an integral part of our life. Say for example, every ordinary person spends so much time thinking about what other people would be thinking of the words he/she uttered or the actions performed.

When you start walking along this path in your thoughts, you feel like you have gone crazy; you just start to think, how much you could have been tricked by your senses all these years; whatever we consider as sensory organs; eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Probably the perception of seeing something is the most easy to explain. It is not just about colors, it can be expanded to every single thing starting from landscapes to people. How can we be sure that we look the same way like we see ourselves in the mirror every day?

This also goes very well with smells and sound. Just sit back and think about the smell of a rose or jasmine; do you think the other person who smells the same flower smells the same odor? Or say a dog barking sound might be interpreted in a different way by every single ear. This can just be the pure basis of our differences in liking something or someone. Everyone perceives everything in a different way; so, why do we even have to think about how we look in others eyes when we are not really sure how we look in the mirror through our eyes is our actual self-image.

So every single moment in our life is driven by this basis of perception. It is left to us to be optimistic or pessimistic; it is left to analyze our lives the way we want to; it is left to us to be joyful or depressed; it is left to us to be critical or gullible. EVERY MOMENT IS OUR OWN PERCEPTIONAL CHOICE!