"Many scientists are scientists because they are afraid of life"

This quote by John Backus, the creator of FORTRAN and the Backus-Naur form inspires this post. This is what Backus had to say in his later years about science and life:

"Many scientists are scientists because they are afraid of life. It's wonderful to be creative in science be use you can do it without clashing with people and suffering the pain of relationships and making your way through the world. It's sort of this aseptic world where you can do exciting things with your faculties, and not encounter any pain. The pain in solving problems is small potatoes compared with the pain you encounter in living.
Introspection is not a scientific activity, it is not repeatable, there are no good theories about how to repeat it, what you expect to find. It's strange that by looking into yourself you really get an appreciation of the mystery of the universe. You don't by trying to find the laws of physics."

Wise words from an old hand, and they ring true. The central idea of any modern science is abstraction, the process of drawing out the essential features that describe and system, while leaving out those which are irrelevant to the goal. Through this abstraction a system is simplified, and the abstraction becomes the basis for a lot of creativity. For eg. Newton abstracted mechanical motion to precisely three laws and this spawned the modern industrial revolution and all its inventions. We now know that Newton's laws cannot explain all phenomena, neither can relativity. The uncertainty principle is a partial acceptance of the fact that everything cannot be explained through abstraction and reason. It's a messy dynamic world out there, at the level of sub atomic particles, where our clean abstractions of matter and energy, wave and particle, force and particle break down. Even our intellect is based on this kind of learning through discrimination, categorisation, and abstraction.

But abstraction is beautiful, which is why the greatest of scientists cherish these abstractions, and adjectives like 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'simple' are applied to great works of science. It is then easy to mistake the abstraction for the 'perfect' and the real for the 'impure'. In essence, one is being afraid, running away from reality - the justification of perfection is only an alibi. This belief in the 'perfection' of abstraction can become fanatical, with disastrous consequences - especially in the social sciences. And so the communist and social Darwinian ideas brought disaster to millions, as the processes of globalisation driven by a fanatical belief in the infallibility of the markets are homogenising an inherently diverse human society.