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Can we really learn anything new from the past? Is it possible to find something original and even useful in an old, forgotten, dusty text? One common assumption of our own times is that novelty and usefulness are the preserve of 'science", to be judged finally by the standard of a technological progress that supersedes everything older than yesterday evening. Yet this is plainly false; for first, there is no such entity as 'science", but many different sciences with different methods, some of them reductive and pragmatic in order to get results, but others more descriptive, non-exclusionary and open-ended, in principle; and, second, 'science" has a habit of discovering its future in the past: Darwin discovered that the new could startlingly be found in a different way of looking at the past. Astrophysics and astronomy help us to see what is really happening in the present by taking us billions of years into the past. Moreover, in order to discover that 96% of the matter and energy in the universe remains a total mystery to us we have had to devise the means of looking intelligently into the pre-human history of our universe. So the past is a part of the present, in some ways, and a reservoir of possibilities for the future; and even if we cannot remember much about the day before yesterday, our fragile ability to record, and then to retrieve in a new way, something of our own history remembered or written thousands of years ago may be crucial to help us overcome uncritical, exclusionary models of science and thought that may even come to threaten our survival.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230240773_15

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