here is a good quote from the epilogue of the book i just finished THE HUMAN COSMOS by Jo Marchant. Sums up the work pretty well:
""perhaps its no surprise, then, that we've ended up with schools that teach equations but not awe; medical systems that for all their expertise, kill millions each year through overuse of drugs and treatments, while marginalizing psychological approaches and denying conditions that don't show up on scans. That we count money instead of valuing happiness; judge our opinions by how many likes they collect; and increasingly hand over the running of our societies to blind AI.
That we obsessively build the stuff around us into new clever technologies, while driving the biosphere that surrounds us into destruction. That we are so focused on screens we barely notice the streetlights that erase our view of the stars.""
so, we have a pretty good understanding of the physical workings of nature and the universe on nearly everything from large to infinitesimally small--we know HOW IT WORKS but we do not KNOW WHY IT WORKS...whats is the motivation of the universe for its actions?
She spends a lot of time on how early science-from ancient sumeria and greece was often ridiculed if it was not inclusive of gods to how renaissance scientists used the prevailing religion of the time to find an understanding for how God works.. which of course is really physics and the other sciences.
But now, if one mentions anything but hardline, academically accepted wonder or thought- that person. even if they are a highly regarded scientist, is instantly ridiculed and 'cancelled' by the science community.. when it was that very same type of wonder and inspection that drove ppl like Newton and Galileo and others to begin with!
Today, Newton would be considered a religious person using science to justify his faith and discarded to the 'alt right' and Da Vinci's science experiments would be rejected by academia because he was not disciplined enough-- too distracted by his art and philosophy
From Palaeolithic paintings to astrophysics … a glittering history takes in explorers, aliens and a world vanishing from view
www.theguardian.com