The reliability of scientific knowledge and the enemies of science

The extraordinary achievements of astronomy in recent years show that critics who question the alleged bias of scientific knowledge don't understand science. Researchers fight attempts to misportray or abuse scientific results for good reason. There are dangerous enemies of science, and the situation is more serious than it may seem.

Outside the world of natural scientists there are many who talk about " the crisis of science," and question the entire direction of science. Many knowledgeable sociologists assert that objective scientific truth does no exist at all. This is also repeated by the apologists of the fashionable philosophy of postmodernism and bellicose clerics. A real war with the scientific outlook thus has been declared. Indeed, there is some danger that we are approaching the sunset of the second great experiment with rationalism (after the classical world). The return of the Middle Ages could become a reality.

We should constantly remind people that from the beginning of the twentieth century, human beings have lived in an environment created by the achievements of science. We usually do not notice the air that we breathe. The rime between scientific discoveries and technological development usually takes decades. Electricity, air travel, television, victory over many mortal illnesses, the common comforts of life that we today enjoy are based in the end on the results of the disinterested curiosity of scientific researchers.

Without the perfect flowers of a fundamental science there will be no fruits suitable for use. This is also true for technology. Modern engineering is based on the laws of mechanics, which have grown out of the observations of the heavenly bodies, and astrophysics is inseparable from the physics of elementary particles. The abstract achievements of a modern-day science will help our grandchildren solve future problems. Technology and civilization itself will eventually die if science is allowed to perish.

Outside Russia, despite severe criticisms of science, rapid developments go on not only in theoretical but also experimental research, demanding huge funding. The Russian six-meter telescope, which in 1980 was the largest in the world, is now outstripped by two dozen telescopes, including two ten-meter instruments, and there are development projects to construct thirty-meter and even one-hundred-meter telescopes.

The achievements of astronomy in recent years seem to come from the pages of science fiction novels. They prove that the crisis of science exists only in the minds of its enemies. Some examples are in order. The dream of discovering planets around the stars inspired astronomers for decades. Since 1995 they are being discovered almost monthly--today we know about eighty planets. It is possible now to compare our solar system with others, to specify the theories about the formation of planets and our Earth, similarly for the geology of useful minerals, etc.

Black holes, an area of space with a strong gravitational field from which light cannot escape, until recently was only a theoretical concept. Today we know of about a dozen candidates for black holes inside our galaxy alone; and we are able to attribute the existence of supermassive black holes in the nuclei of some fifty galaxies. Movements of stars at the center of our galaxy recently were measured that prove the presence of invisible objects with masses of 2 million suns. Black holes, opening a window in other spaces and times, have become a reality!

Modern cosmology removes a problem of the origin of our universe, asserting that it, as well as other universes, spontaneously arose from a primary vacuum, and this process of generation of new universes basically can someday be reproduced in our laboratories by the collision of elementary particles of super-high energy. Was our universe created in the laboratory of an ancient super-mighty civilization? Deep problems of human existence are posed by modern science. The view that science is poor in spirit is simply due to ignorance of its frontiers.

For the past half-century, due to space research and the development of radio-astronomy, the energetic range of quantums of electromagnetic radiation of heavenly bodies accessible to study has extended fifteen orders of magnitude. Humans have visited the Moon, and have sent rocket probes to other planets. The knowledge gained via optical telescopes in a tiny window of wavelengths through a terrestrial atmosphere has been completely confirmed by these achievements. The development of methods of neutrino registration recently has brought confirmation (contrary to first results) of the validity of the theory of the sources of energy of the Sun (and the stars in general). Incoming observations of gravitational waves will allow testing many theories and certainly will bring challenging new problems. In view of this, what is the "crisis of science" that its critics speak of?

The injustice of the statements of the critics of science is especially clear in astronomy. Observational programs enable us to verify conclusions of concrete theories, but frequently new phenomena are discovered or objects explained by other theories are also tested.