Too many doctors, not enough scientists

The push for the education of science comes primarily from parents. They’re the ones who tell us from the outset that we must either become doctors or engineers. And as we all know very well that that advice is not driven by the sheer love for scientific knowledge but rather completely driven by the love for a fat paycheck. And the prestige that comes with it, which also has roots in the ability to swell up one’s bank account by writing prescription medicines. That’s the closest we get to science in this country. The word science is always heard as the name attached to the more important name: medical. It’s medical science you’re told to excel in.

When was the last time or ever when you heard someone tell their children or younger siblings to focus on physics or astrophysics or the science of curved space or maybe quantum mechanics? My guess is you’ve never heard anyone giving such advice because I tried giving this advice to young kids of my friends who visit the mosque with their father. They don’t even know how to respond because they’ve never been explained this to. Many argue that being a doctor isn’t just about money but also about saving people. I agree but the entire humanity can be saved in the exploration of space. Einstein and Newton continue to serve humanity much more than any doctor ever has.

Speaking of those two science giants, let me arrive at the topic of this article. Pakistani education never runs out of ways to create feelings of disgust but this one in particular has not only made me angry but also extremely shocked.

What have you read in your school textbooks about gravity? What do kids today read in their physics textbooks about gravity? Well, you’ve probably read that things fall to the ground because there’s a force called gravity that attracts everything toward itself. That’s it in a nutshell right?

Would you be surprised to know that the opposite is actually true. That things fall and we walk and everything else we’ve been taught about gravity is not because the surface of the earth attracts us but because the surface of the earth rather pushes us upward. Yes, that last line wasn’t a typo. We’re pushed to the earth surface by the curved space above us. Earth gets in our way and pushes us up.

For over 200 years, the world lived with Newtonian physics and gravity as he had explained when that fateful apple fell on the grass of his legendary estate. Then came the German Jewish scientist named Albert Einstein. He basically threw out Newton’s Gravitational pull, which we remember as G from our school textbooks.

Einstein said that there’s no such thing as a mysterious force that acts at a distance without any medium. The earth pulls the moon and the sun pulls the earth in their respective orbits. What’s between them, he asked. It’s space. Space has to be the medium for communicating that force of gravity. Turns out space bends and is malleable. Space is curved. If you can remember one sentence from this article let it be this last one. Celestial bodies such as earth warp the space around them creating a depth in space, which forces the moon to orbit around it. The sun being much bigger than earth warps the space around it and compels the earth to orbit around a common centre. That’s gravity. What Newton would call gravity is what Einstein called the curvature of spacetime.

The reason I am shocked when I look at Pakistani school textbooks is that all this I mentioned above has been known to the world for more than a 100 years now and proven for about a 100 years. We are yet to wake up and teach our next generation about it. Do you still wonder why we have countless Pakistani doctors in America and England and yet not many scientists or astronomers?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2024.

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