The Goal is about science and education. I believe that these
two words have been abused to the extent that their original
meanings have been lost in a fog of too much respect and mystery.
Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable scientists,
is not about the secrets of nature or even about truths.
Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum
set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward
logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.
The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It
is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous
amount of natural phenomena. Such an assumption can never be
proven since even an infinite number of phenomena that can be
explained by it does not prove its universal application. On the
other hand, it can be disproved by just a single phenomenon that
cannot be explained by the assumption. This disproving does not
detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the
need or even the existence of another assumption that is more
valid. This is the case with the assumption of the conservation of
energy which was replaced by Einstein's more global-more valid
-postulation of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein's
assumption is not true to the same extent that the previous one
was not "true".
Somehow we have restricted the connotation of science to a
very selective, limited assemblage of natural phenomena. We refer
to science when we deal with physics, chemistry or biology.
We should also realize that there are many more phenomena of
nature that do not fall into these categories, for instance those
phenomena we see in organizations, particularly those in industrial
organizations. If these phenomena are not phenomena of
nature, what are they? Do we want to place what we see in organizations
to the arena of fiction rather than into reality?