What was the relationship between the power and influence of science on twentieth-century thought and the pursuit of utopia? Were these two tendencies allied or in opposition?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Even while it registered enormous effects across the world, Western science changed from within. In the early twentieth century, technology hurtled into a new phase, inaugurating an electric age, much as the nineteenth had been an age of steam. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi broadcast by wireless radio across the Atlantic. In 1903, the Wright brothers took flight in North Carolina. Plastic was invented in 1907 . Curiosities of late nineteenth-century inventiveness—telephones, cars, typewriters—became commonplace. Other essentials of technologically fulfilled twentieth-century lives—the atom smasher, the steel–concrete skyscraper frame, even the hamburger—were all in place before the First World War. On the other hand, the scientific world at the start of the century was in a state of self-questioning, confused by rogue results. Poincaré set the tone for at least 100 years of struggle between science and skepticism—skepticism about our ability to know anything for certain. The result of this skepticism was that science, for all its achievements, could never replace ideology. It could not command ordinary people's allegiance the way that religious or political systems could. Its admirers and many of its practitioners came to believe in its unique virtue and even in its potential power to supplant other guides to life, such as religion, reason, instinct, and common sense. But there were always skeptics who sneered at it, or snubbed it, or doubted its claims, or feared its consequences. Only gradually, through percolation within the scientific community and vulgarization in the press and popular science books, could scientists modify how ordinary people thought about the world. In the light of the theoretical contributions of quantum science and revolutionary logic and mathematics, however, the world was beginning to look increasingly disorderly. Meanwhile, practical discoveries and empirical observations jarred, even more uncomfortably, the equilibrium of the old picture of the cosmos. Toward the end of the century, divisions—sometimes called culture wars—opened between apologists of science and advocates of alternatives. The search for the underlying or overarching order of the cosmos seemed only to lead to chaos. The expansion of knowledge added nothing to wisdom. Science did not make people better. Rather it increased their ability to behave worse than ever before. Instead of a universal benefit to humanity, science was a symptom or cause of disproportionate Western power. Ordinary people never really got power over their own lives or over the societies they formed—even in states founded in revolutions or regulated by democratic institutions. The progress people hoped for in the early years of the twentieth century dissolved in the bloodiest wars ever experienced. And just as Western science receded in the second half of the century, so did Western empires.