What in the name of .....

None takes philosophy seriously now. It has been sort of banished from the scene altogether. Our modern oracle is the science and it says you can’t look for absolutes any more. There are no absolutes; there are only relative truths, partial revelations.

But ever since the inception of quantum mechanics, the basic belief of science that the world is material has taken a terrible knocking. We can’t even determine the building blocks of the universe with its help. It seems that there are hundreds of primary particles in the universe, every one equally important.

What is more worrying is that our limitations extend to the instruments that we make use of. We can’t even see an electron in action, for to see it we need to use the gamma rays of radium or such rays but even weaker rays tend to disperse them completely and drive them out of our sight. What we relay on now is the pictures that an electron emission makes if they are driven towards a photographic plate to determine that they exist.

Science has not been able to determine whether the matter it studies is made of waves or particles. There is total uncertainty in the sub atomic world. At the cosmic level we see galaxies flying away at such immense speeds that the universe is becoming larger and larger by the minute. Einstein had once said the ray of light would have to come back to its source after 35 billion light years or so. It was assumed that was the breadth of our universe because the velocity of light was supposed to be the limiting velocity in the universe.

But no one believes it now. The universe seems to be much larger than that.
As the sciences do not provide any answers to our questions it was but natural to look for other sources of illumination. A good source would have been philosophy, but instead most people have turned towards theology for consolation. Well it is the easy way; you only need to have faith to go for it. The rest is taught you in ready made form. All answers are in the holy book. Philosophy is not okay at all, it takes up much time and who has time in this world?

The fact is that none is interested in the subject now.

We can’t blame people for that too. The sphere of human knowledge has become so vast that even the greatest of minds would find it impossible to attempt to learn the basic facts of different sciences. This is pre requisite before going for philosophy. Aristotle was able to do it in his age. Yet a little boy or girl in our times would be able to correct him in many of his assumptions. That is how we have grown. We can’t learn everything about everything in our small life span.

Science has divided the whole of human knowledge into small kingdoms and no one has the right to meddle in it unless he is qualified in it.

But yet we would like to know what this life is all about, would we not?
Let us ask Thales of Miletus about what causes everything.

“No doubt everything comes out of water and would return to water”
What if we ask the same question to Democritus?

“Atoms and space, there is nothing else, atoms and space”

Let us not consider whether these statements are true according to modern science. Some would argue for it and some against it. They would be right too. It is a matter of point of view. But there is something more serious in the above observations. Both our guests were trying to unravel what lies behind all the phenomena we see around us, from stars to a grain of sand, from man to microbe. They were after learning the essence of life and the world.
And this is what we are after too. This does not concern any of the modern sciences. No science has yet stated it is after finding the basic and general principle at work in making the world.
Some say it is lays the sphere of Theology. But we can’t leave it at that, can we. To us it is far too important to leave it to any reverend or rabbi or swami or mullah. Let us even grant that there is something in what these people say and teach. But they have learnt it second hand, and those that taught them learnt it second hand too and so on backwards.

So where do we stand? We stand at some place where the sciences can not help us and we do not really believe our priestly buddies can too.

This is what is called an impasse

We do not have time to spend on the thing too. We have too many concerns, too many preoccupations, too many commitments. We are rushed for time; at times we do not have enough time for a nice-

Yet we are intrigued. What in the name of god is the world about! This comes to us in our rare moments of our respite. What the heck, where does this come from. It is most disquieting of all feelings, this unresolved riddle of life.

We need to investigate it do we not?

I