What is Reality, and how has Science helped us understand it?

Inspired from "The Magic of Reality, by Richard Dawkins"

What is reality? or what does it mean when someone says something is real? When something exists, then we say it is real or it is part of reality.?

How do we ensure something exists?

We detect their presence through one of our five senses - sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste.

We see a camel, we smell a flower, we touch our pet, we taste a sweet dish, etc. and therefore we ensure that they are all part of this reality.

How about a dinosaur, that we can't feel and confirm as being part of this reality by our sense organs? How about a distant star that by the time we see them they might have fizzled out? How about a bacterium - we don't get to feel them through our raw senses. But science has progressed to a level that we are capable of boosting our senses via equipments that help us see what we can't see with our naked eyes.

We have scanning electron microscopes to visualize microbes, we have telescopes to see distant stars or galaxies. We have a stethescope to help us listen to heartbeats and lung sounds. How about dinosaurs? How do we make them part of this real world? We have fossils of dinosaurs. Fossils tell us how many years back these animals had been part of reality. We know how fossils are made - When animals die their skeletal form remains. Minerals that are dissolved in water seep into the skeleton and crystallize on top of it, leaving the imprint of the animal.

A remarkable aspect of reality is that even when we see an object with our naked eye or using a telescope, what we see is the reflected light from the object we see. Light takes a fraction of a second to travel from the object to reach the retinas of our eyes. This means that when we see an object at a particular instant, what we see is not "THE STATE OF THE OBJECT" at the very instant we see it, but the object in history. Sunlight takes eight minutes to travel to the earth. Imagine if the sun blows up; the catastrophic effect of which would not part of our reality until eight minutes are elapsed. After the sun, it is the alpha centaury. If we were to catch sight of the alpha centaury through a much more powerful telescope, in 2022, what we see is the light that started its travel about four years back. In other words what we see is not the alpha centaury of 2022, but of 2018. So, isn't it better to say that light is a time travel machine enabling us to see an object in the past?

Sometimes, microscopes and telescopes won't be sufficient to understand reality; in such situations, scientists make assumptions about how the process is going on, and then they use models to replicate the process. Later, he tries to work out the actual process using the model. If it is successful, he accepts the model, and the reality of the process becomes known to us. For example, until the late 19th century, it wasn't known to the world that genes are the carriers of inherited traits, from generation to generation. Everyone was aware that when two organisms sexually reproduce, parental characters are passed onto the offspring, but none had clues as to what the actual carriers were.?

It was an Austrian monk, Gregor Johan Mendel, who conducted a series of breeding experiments using Pisum sativum as a model. It is not possible to observe how characters are passed down from parents to offspring, by using an ultra-powerful microscope. Gregor Mendel conducted a breeding experiment between two pea plants that differed in a single character.

With his experiments, he could work out how traits descended from parents to offspring. With his experiments, he proposes three different laws.?

1. Law of dominance

Every character has got two forms. A dominant form and a recessive form. These are encoded in two individual physical factors. So factors controlling a character are as seen in pairs; one is dominant and the other is recessive.?

2. Law of segregation

Factors that control a character are seen in pairs. During gamete formation, each gamete receives one single factor from the pairs.?

3. Law of independent assortment

Pairs of factors that control two different characters segregate independently of each other. A factor that controls a character segregates into a gamete independent of the pair of factors that control 2nd character.?

His studies were revolutionary in that by now, we know that these factors are the carriers of characters and they are called genes.

Studies conducted using fruit flies show that these genes are strung out on a long thread - called chromosomes - in an orderly fashion.?

Another example of how models helped us understand a process is when James Watson and Francis crick built DNA double-helix out of metals and other materials. The construction of helical DNA was based on the parameters revealed by the X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA, by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.?

So, this is how science works. When we do not know how something works, we go ahead trying to understand more about the problem. If our senses cannot grasp, we think of ways to capacitate them. This is a slow process, gradually adding progressive changes to the existing methods/equipment, and finally coming out with a well-refined one. Sometimes we may need to imagine. We should not just dream up and believe the dream up-front; we need to work it out using models. If the population is growing year after year, causing a threat to the existence of nature, one could explain it using, maybe, "The Original Sin". But a thorough investigation can figure out all the variables that drive population growth and using a mathematical equation, one can make predictions and work out finding a long-term solution to the problem.?

image source: Past, Present and Future of Augmented and Virtual Reality | DAA Capital Partners