History is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man

The Telescope and the Dream

In 1633, an old man knelt before the Roman Inquisition and was made to renounce the claim that the Earth moves round the Sun. Galileo lost that day, and the guardians of a beautiful, ordered cosmos won. Yet within half a century of his death, Newton's laws had made his heresy common sense, and the heavens had become a problem in mathematics rather than a stage for myth. Stories like this tempt us to read the human past as one long contest in which the scientific man, who measures, tests and doubts, keeps defeating the romantic man, who feels, imagines and believes. The proposition is seductive and largely true about the tools of civilisation. But history is better read as a partnership in which the romantic man supplies the questions, the courage and the conscience, and the scientific man supplies the answers, so that every lasting victory has been won by both together.

Consider first the case for the proposition. For most of history, disease was read as divine punishment and famine as fate. Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine of 1796 began a chain of patient experiment that ended with the World Health Organization declaring smallpox eradicated in 1980, the first human disease wiped out by deliberate effort. The germ theory of Pasteur and Koch replaced miasma and evil spirits with microbes that could be seen, cultured and killed. Life expectancy, which hovered around thirty years for most of recorded time, has more than doubled across much of the world. No poem, however moving, ever cured cholera; clean water, sanitation and antibiotics did.

India's own story bears the same mark. In the mid-1960s the country lived "ship to mouth" on American wheat shipments. The Green Revolution, built on Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat and adapted to Indian fields by M.S. Swaminathan, turned a food-importing nation into a food-secure one within a generation. When Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the lunar south pole in August 2023, India became the first nation to land there, and the Moon, long the beloved of poets, became a site of data. The Constitution itself took sides: the 42nd Amendment of 1976 added Article 51A(h), making it a fundamental duty to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.

The victory has been social as well as material. Raja Ram Mohan Roy fought the practice of sati with reason and scriptural evidence, and Lord William Bentinck's regulation abolished it in 1829. Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar turned the tools of evidence and argument against caste hierarchies that claimed divine sanction. The European Enlightenment gave this temper its motto when Kant urged humanity, in 1784, to dare to know. Wherever superstition sanctified cruelty, the scientific man's patient question, "How do you know?", has been an instrument of liberation.

Yet the proposition, read literally, breaks down at three points. The first is that the romantic man has been the engine of history's greatest moral movements. India's freedom struggle was not won by a laboratory; it was won by a frail man who spoke of truth-force, walked to Dandi in 1930 to pick up a fistful of salt, and made millions believe that a non-violent nation could humble an empire. Gandhi distrusted machinery in Hind Swaraj, and Tagore wrote of a mind without fear, but their romance of freedom moved more people than any engine. The abolition of slavery, the vote for women and the end of apartheid were victories of moral imagination before they were victories of law.

The second is that science without a romantic conscience has produced history's darkest chapters. The physics that lights our cities also destroyed Hiroshima in August 1945. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled that the first atomic test brought to his mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita:

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

The so-called scientific racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dressed prejudice in the language of measurement and fed eugenics programmes. Industrial science, pursued without reverence for nature, has delivered a warming planet. When the villagers of the Chipko movement, led by women such as Gaura Devi of Reni, hugged the trees of the Garhwal Himalaya in the 1970s, they acted from love of the forest, not from ecological models, yet later science on soil, water and slopes proved them right. Here the romantic man was ahead of the scientific one.

The third, and subtlest, point is that the scientific man is himself romantic at his core. Einstein insisted that imagination is more important than knowledge, and his theory of relativity began with a teenage daydream of riding alongside a beam of light. Srinivasa Ramanujan credited his family goddess Namagiri with formulae that kept mathematicians busy for decades after his death. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who led India's missile programme, told students to dream, because dreams become thoughts and thoughts become action. Every great experiment begins as an act of faith that the universe is intelligible and worth the effort. Without wonder, there would be no science to win anything.

Building upon this, the relationship between the two figures looks less like a war and more like a dialogue. C.P. Snow warned in his 1959 lecture on "The Two Cultures" that the gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals was a danger to the West's capacity to solve its problems. Einstein put the balance in a single line, that science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. The romantic man asks why and for whom; the scientific man asks how and how much. A society that keeps only one of them becomes either a museum of beliefs or a factory without a purpose.

This dialogue matters more today than at any point in the past. Artificial intelligence can now write, diagnose and predict, and the temptation is to treat every human question as an optimisation problem. Yet the debates that will decide our century, about privacy, the dignity of work, the rights of future generations and the limits of genetic editing, cannot be settled by computation alone. They need the romantic man's capacity for empathy and his stubborn belief that some things are not for sale. India's own approach to digital public infrastructure, open and inclusive by design, shows how a moral idea can steer a technology rather than merely follow it.

History, then, does record a series of victories by the scientific man over ignorance, disease, hunger and superstition, and those victories deserve to be defended against every new wave of irrationality. But the deeper pattern is that each victory was won when reason served a dream: Galileo's telescope served a longing to know the heavens, the vaccine served compassion, and the rocket served a nation's hope. The task for our time is not to choose between the telescope and the dream but to hold both, so that the scientific man keeps his reason and the romantic man keeps his heart. The old man before the Inquisition lost his trial and won the future because he combined both: he saw with instruments, and even under house arrest he kept working, with the stubbornness of a poet, on the science that would outlive his judges.