Science is a plethora of knowledge that has taken hundreds of years to build up and piece together. Steven Pinker, a renowned professor in the psychology department at Harvard University is a strong advocate of this notion. In 2013, Pinker published an article called, “Science is Not Your Enemy”. It is here where Pinker made the statement that he often “long[s] to travel back in time and offer [the great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment] some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments…” (Pinker). Pinker made the point that without all of the time we have had to further our resources and accumulate data, we may still be at the same place in science that we were decades ago. Another renowned author by the name of Jonah Lehrer wrote in his article, “The Future of Science…Is Art?” about a similar perspective.  Lehrer said, “the history of science is supposed to obey a simple equation: Time plus data equals understanding” (Lehrer), providing further evidence that progression in science is largely dependent on time.

Advances in science and technology have changed drastically over time. It is almost difficult to imagine a life in which technology did not exist. In 2013, Steven Pinker, a renowned professor in the psychology department at Harvard University published an article called, “Science is Not Your Enemy”. It is here where Pinker made the statement that he often “long[s] to travel back in time and offer [the great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment] some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments…” (Pinker). I thought this was very fascinating. I had always wondered myself about what it would be like to hand an iPhone to a person in the nineteenth century. What would they possibly make of it? Pinker also had questions. Unfortunately, these are inquiries that will forever go unanswered.