The ironic conclusion he had come to was that, contrary to everything that anyone raised in the self-congratulatory Terran tradition would have believed, the very unimaginativeness that Terrans found incomprehensible was what had enabled the Hyadeans to make breakthroughs that left Earth’s scientific community dazed and incredulous. Truth was, the insights he had vowed to share were turning out to be not really that exciting after all. It was the flights of imaginative fancy dreamed up by generations of Terran scientists that were exciting; the only problem was, overwhelmingly, they had this tendency to be wrong.
The Hyadeans ploddingly followed wherever the facts led, without subscribing to elaborate theoretical constructs that emotional investment would cause them to defend tenaciously instead of testing impartially. True enough, the textbook accounts and rhetoric bandied around on Earth praised the scientific method as an ideal; and academia could always count on a staunch cadre of apologists to exalt it into reality. But the basic human drives were emotional, not objective, resulting in commitment to protecting ideas that were comfortingly familiar instead of openness to the research that might threaten them. Most of what Earth took such pride in as “science” was as much a product of human inventiveness as its other arts and fables.
By contrast, the Hyadean attempts to understand the universe were closer to what would have been described on Earth as engineering. What didn’t work was abandoned without compunction, and what did was accepted at face value without need of credentials to fit with prevailing theory. The resulting scheme of things was messy, incoherent, and to Terran eyes, crying out to be organized under grand unifying principles postulating answers to questions the Hyadeans had never asked. But so what? At the end of it all the fact remained that they were here, while we hadn’t gotten there. That had to say something.
Krossig, the Hyadean anthropologist who was here to study humans, came in and began rummaging for something among the shelves on the far wall. As Blair watched him across the desktop, he reflected on the irony that the Hyadean inclination not to question was also what made them so susceptible to their own social conditioning propaganda, and hence ideal subjects for a conformist society. His brow creased at the seeming paradox. Wasn’t readiness to question supposed to be the hallmark of what science was all about? If the Hyadeans didn’t question, how could they have made such superb scientific accomplishments? He sat back in his chair and mulled over the problem.
Questioning led to good science when what was being questioned was a belief system that had become dogma. Since the Hyadeans didn’t create dogmas, they could get by without need to question them. Accepting uncritically worked when the facts were allowed to speak for themselves. It also produced rigidly structured social orders.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HYADEANS HAD NEVER FALLEN into the Terran habit of creating false gods that would reveal the ultimate truths of the Universe. One of the most recent creations to be elevated to the status of infallible deity was mathematics. The Hyadeans took advantage of the fortuitous fact that some mathematical procedures approximated real-world processes sufficiently closely over a limited range to be useful, and looking no further than that, found an invaluable servant. Terrans turned things upside down by persuading themselves that their manipulations of formal systems of symbols defined “laws” that reality was somehow obliged to imitate. In doing so they subjected themselves to a tyrannical master.
Relativity theory had pursued mathematical elegance by seeking to extend to electromagnetism the familiar principles of Galilean relativity, whereby the equations describing mechanical motion came out the same regardless of whose moving reference frame measurements were made from. A consistent solution required that the velocity of light be the same for all observers, which became one of the theory’s postulates. Peculiar distortions of space and time were necessary to maintain a velocity as constant, and the various relativistic transformations followed. These also enabled the famous experiment by Michelson and Morley in 1886, and its variants repeated to greater accuracies ever since, which failed to find an ether “wind” due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun, as demonstrating that there was no ether—no “preferred” reference frame in which “true” laws of physics operated.