Mintze van der Velde is Director of Lucis Trust and World Goodwill in Geneva.
Science and technology are not the same thing. This, together with many other profound insights, was beautifully explained by my late friend Dr. Jim Ryder, in a talk called The Garment of God at the Arcane School conference in 2018. Of course, science and technology are related. Sometimes scientific breakthroughs give rise to technological progress and sometimes progress in technology helps science to advance.
As an example, I will only mention here the technological progress made with our telescopes. The first optical telescopes appeared in the 17th century and were of course earth based. In the present time, however, we have telescopes in space (including among others, the Hubble and James Webb telescopes) allowing us to look into space beyond the visible part of the spectrum with stunning results, complemented by large arrays of telescopes on earth giving equally stunning results. The images we obtain nowadays on an almost daily basis give us a picture of the universe that also on an almost daily basis raise more questions than answers.
This evolution of telescopes has been paralleled by scientific advancements but for approximately the last century there have been no significant scientific revolutions. The latest are the emergence of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity theories. Of course, the discovery of the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, black holes and many others have made headlines in the press, but these are more exercises in communication than scientific breakthroughs: they fill in the details of our theories developed about a century ago.
Video and transcript at: https://bit.ly/3NDPSeP
