Imagine how our ancestors lived 10 thousand years ago. They didn’t know anything about our world. They lived in an environment that would seem like a torturous one today. For context: Farming just began 10 thousand years ago, so the food really sucked back then.
Our ancestors did not understand how plants grow or the reason behind seeds turning into grown plants that they can dry up and eat later. The world was a brutal place at that point in time.
But, the Big question is how did we reach here? how did our world change so much that today there is abundance of food, healthcare, cars, planes, rockets, candy, netflix, music, art, culture.
The answer is Conjectures.
Conjectures are guesses. Humans are guessing machines. You might think what does guessing has to do with the progress of humans? Isn’t science what has lead to all these great marvels we see today? Yes, of course. Science has lead to human progress but there would be no science without conjectures.
You see, science is knowledge about how our world works. Science of the physical world is physics, Science of chemicals is chemistry and so on. But Science has only been around for about 350 years. Before that there was no science. That world had myths, legends, explanations with no reasoning at all, most things were explained in terms of GODS. This god causes rain, that god causes floods, this god causes wars, that god causes plague etc…
So what lead to the creation of the field of science? Well, most experts would say Enlightenment era lead to the creation of the field of science. This dates back to 1700s and 1800s when people began to realise that they needed to create a discipline that would be Free of all religious dogma and beliefs, free of rule of thumb explanations, people realised they needed to understand how to classify reasoning in terms of good and bad explanations.
It was the enlightenment era that lead to the creation of ideas which would allow people to criticize authoritarian communities that would not allow people to come up with explanations that were not inline with the word of god.
If people don’t question, why thinks work the way they do, why things happen the way they happen, they can’t learning anything. Such a world would be full of prophets and myths which only exist in stories and never become real. This philosophy is what lead to the creation of scientific fields.
But how does someone even come up with an explanation about the way the world works? how does someone come up with equations and explanations that explain how a ball rolls down a plank, how the planets revolved around the sun, the distance between celestial bodies without using measuring tapes?
It’s all based on guesses. These people tend to work in a way where they assume something , they make a guess, then they try to check whether their guesses lead to correct future predictions or not. If yes, then they make more guesses about the guesses they previously made, about how that happened or how something else might happen. Do this long enough and we get a theory that is very good at predicting how things work in our world.
So it’s all just Conjectures done over and over again, that lead to progress.
You also need to keep in mind that all the theories that science has are just models. Every few decades people come up with new models that tend to disprove previous theories. So no theory is completely correct. We NEVER REALLY GET THE REAL PICTURE OF REALITY. So it’s all a big guessing game.