"Long ago, in the city of Ashkelon, the people were plagued by a coven of 80 witches...Not only did [the witches] play nasty tricks, such as turning wine into vinegar, or causing the fire to go out, but they also brought about grave dangers, casting spells that kept the rain from falling, and causing the cows to go dry."
-Babylon, c. fifth century; retold by Harold Schwartz in Leaves From The Garden of Eden
But part of me keeps stepping outside the story and whispering to myself that truly, science is our "candle in the dark:"
"For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror."
-The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan
All of the things that we blamed and tortured other humans for? Killing them didn't stop bacteria from living their lives, or fires from running out of fuel or oxygen, or weather patterns from shifting over time, or bovine biology from running its course.
Science has found ways to fight bacteria (although they may learn evolve faster than we can invent). Science has a pretty good explanation for what fire is, and what affects it. Science has some beautiful models that may give us a start on weather (see Lorenz attractors, now taught in any decent first course on differential equations, but also light a candle for Lovelace and Babbage and Turing and Hopper, because some mathematics needs computer graphics to drive home the point), and science has made the U.S.A. take safe, endless supplies of milk for granted.
Science is my candle in the dark. Nay, not just my candle, but my bonfire, my excited vapor returning to a lower-energy state, my sun and star emitting energy all along the electromagnetic spectrum.
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