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Proposed CERN DG talk to Davos Forum.
Feb. 14th, 2012 12:04 amRecently, Michael Dittmar, the president of the CERN discussion club "ConCERNed for humanity" expressed his opinion about the speeches CERN Director General gave in the Davos forum. Here it is:
Dear all,
Dear all,
after having found the time, here are the speeches from our Director General in Davos 2011 and 2012. I am sorry to say, but these "speeches" do not indicate anything close to the problems humanity is facing. (may be you find more in the speeches than I could!). I invite everybody to write a 1 page speech our DG should have given. Interesting price(s) for the best speech will be distributed at our annual general assembly around end of march!
Michael.
I found this appeal as a good possiblity to express my views on science, human beings and the Universe. Below my "1 page DG Davos talk" is presented.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I will speak as an ambassador of science to this forum, so I will try to summarize the most important facts about it and make conclusions.I think, the most important fact about science is its scale. The biggest object we are observing and describing is the Universe, which is 13.7 billion years old. A size of the visible Universe exceeds our own size by more than 26 orders of magnitude. From the other side, the smallest distances we are examining and describing are about 19 orders of magnitude smaller than our own size. Thus, the entire span of scientific cognition, observation and understanding, exceeds 45 orders of magnitude. This is an unimaginably huge, truly cosmic number! This number by itself tells something very important about us, human beings. It tells us that a human being has a cosmic scale, meaning and power. This fact should be kept in the center of our attention when we are trying to understand who we are, what is our potential, and what our primary values should be.
The second important fact I want to underline about science is its relation to civilization. When we are looking at the history of science, we definitely see that it developed together with freedom of thought, together with civil rights. Both ancient and modern history, as well as contemporary map of scientific development, clearly shows this fact. Science, both, requires human rights, and works as a big power of freedom. Also, scientific research unites all the people in their common efforts for objective truth and technological progress, thus working for peace on our planet. All scientifically strong countries, which are democratic countries, are allies, and wars between them are already unthinkable. Thus, science, technology, freedom, peace, and prosperity are big values, strongly requiring and empowering each other.
However, it is also true, that science and technology are bringing humanity to new problems and challenges: resource exhaustion, pollution, overpopulation, growing chasm between people, with and without access to science and technology. Way of life of the developed countries is not ecologically sustainable, and this fact has to be taken very seriously. The danger is already around the corner. In a near future, either we will be able to find a much more sustainable technologies, or our civilization will have a catastrophic end. Serious ecological catastrophe, compromising of science and technology would most likely result in a crash of the other essential of our civilization – civil rights. As I already mentioned, scientific progress, free thought, and civil rights require and support each other, so a crash of one would most likely kill the other. Thus, an ecological catastrophe would probably result in a resurrection of totalitarian societies, multiple wars, a new era of dark ages with an oblivion of history, loss of science, art, humanities.
I am talking about this gloomy scenario with a hope that we can avoid it. My hope is based on that revelation of our cosmic power and meaning I started my speech from. At the same time, I am sure, this dismal path of events is a big and real danger. It is impossible to know future, but we have to do our best to see clearly the growing dangers and to prevent them. There are several vitally important things which definitely need much more attention and support than they currently have. Namely:
- Scientific and technological research for renewable sources of energy;
- Research for more sustainable ways of production;
- Broad ecological studies;
- Educational efforts, both within the Western civilization and outside it.
In this extremely short talk I tried to describe the most important things about science and its relation to our life, as I see that. I hope it was useful. Many thanks for your attention.
