The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts, and there are redundant parts.

The narrative of The Course of Science can be postponed after entering the new millennium. After all, time needs to wait. From the year when Einstein published his theory of relativity, it is very difficult to describe the fields that the subsequent scientific discoveries entered from the perspective of popular science. Especially at the end of the 20th century, science seems to have brought rapid changes to the world, but the journey of scientific discovery seems to have come to a standstill. This may be a bit premature for humans. Perhaps after we have gained such great ability, the need for "answers" is even more urgent.

If I review the whole story in science courses, I will pay special attention to Copernicus's "celestial sphere theory" in the middle ages and the atomic bomb explosion in the middle of the 20th century. These two seemingly unrelated things, if viewed from a historical perspective, essentially represent the same thinking and reflection of human beings. Perhaps the latter will be more wary of human beings. After all, we have to admit that we can only try our best to master nuclear energy on the way to explore it, instead of playing with it. These two events in the history of science can no longer be simply classified as historical events. On the contrary, we need to apply a common language paradigm in history textbooks: they will have a far-reaching impact on history! When people look back on the history of the 20th century hundreds of years later, they will definitely feel different from us!

I dare not say that The Course of Science written by Mr. Wu Guosheng is the best work in the history of science. However, writing such a book about the history of science by people with scientific literacy will reduce the exaggeration of emotions and words and excessive speculation about describing facts in the narrative process. The concreteness, clarity, accuracy and conciseness of Mr. Wu Guosheng's language are the foundation of the birth of scientific logic. I compared some overlapping contents between Wu Guosheng's History of Science and Cao Tianyuan's History of Quantum Physics. Then the characteristics of the logical relationship between words I mentioned above are quite obvious. One of the reasons why popular science works are difficult to be popular is that the process of scientific discovery is not as interesting as we thought. On the contrary, it is full of conjecture, model design and mathematical calculation. The history of quantum physics has lowered the threshold for readers to read to some extent, but to some extent, it has covered up the difficulties of science itself. Although scientific discovery may also be one of the high probability events, it will never happen to be discovered by us. In Wu Guosheng's The Course of Science, we can see that the inheritance of science is orderly, and it is this continuous pulse that makes it possible for us to have the "knowledge" so far. One of these missing links, a person's birth, may make us live in another different generation. It can only be said that we are lucky to have all kinds of knowledge and cognition now!

The birth of knowledge has never been "pregnancy in October, one delivery". The "knowledge" I am talking about here is not empirical knowledge in the general sense. It is deterministic knowledge and intrinsic knowledge. In modern Chinese, the word "knowledge" has become quite mediocre, and anyone who knows something can brazenly admit that he is knowledgeable. The word "knowledge" I am talking about here is the understanding of "knowledge" by the ancient Greeks or the original meaning of the word "knowledge" was initiated by Socrates.

In this world picture constructed by "knowledge", we now know for sure that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. Although the "world picture" comes from the eyes of the viewer, it is also the final destination of our different ways of understanding the world. Therefore, on the ladder of human progress, the world picture once appeared in front of us in different forms and faces, and we may mistakenly think that we live in the same world, but really, after different people adopt different observation methods, seeing is believing that this "one world" is just many aspects of the "world picture". Or in more plain words, the same world, we use different "world pictures" to describe what we see. The reason why we use such complicated language is because we need to understand that our understanding of the world is still in the process of "the blind touch the elephant". We may be good at assembling, combining and connecting the parts that each blind person touches, but unfortunately it can never represent the whole.

In the process of constructing the "world picture", I believe that the world seen by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton is very different from that seen by Einstein and Planck. Of course, the world we touch every day is completely different from the world built by these sages. If we attribute the crux of the problem to time, it can only show that we have not made progress.

In the process of science, I was deeply fascinated by the idea of "world picture". According to historical records, this so-called "world picture" has been changing all the time, but the important factor affecting the world picture is not time, but the way we observe it has changed a lot. The elephant may never change when the blind man touches the elephant, but the blind man has become more experienced! Is this experience-based history another expression of "scientific process"?

At this point, I began to believe in other statements about the world picture. I believe that someone or several people who live with me in this world have seen other styles of "world picture" about this world that I have never seen before. As for what they saw, few people may believe it until now. But I believe they did see something. This reminds me of a sentence that Roy, the clone in the movie blade runner, said in the rain:

I always believe that Roy's "incredible things I have seen you humans" will not only appear in lines and movies. Although some people may think that the burning spaceship of Orion and the dark universe of "Don whitehead's Gate" are no different from nonsense. Then please believe that this is a lie. I think this is the most affectionate feeling. But we can all be sure that we can correctly distinguish what is reality and what is film. Only at this level, we have different beliefs.

Blade runner was filmed in 1984, and I knew and watched this film in 20 17. The time interval is 33 years. It's just that in the process of reading the course of science, every time I close the pages, I will see Roy telling this passage in the rain. Indeed, someone saw all this, and he just told his story with the help of Roy!

We regard it as a dream!