I will use examples to demonstrate, firstly, that science does not enlighten the world, but - on the contrary - romanticizes it; secondly, that science does not reveal secrets, but - on the contrary - deepens them; and thirdly, that factual knowledge is not enough to understand something, but that it is necessary to imagine a problem in order to be able to play with it mentally. Science must be practiced as an art, so to speak. The example is about light, which we want to know what it is.
In the 19th century, light was thought to be electromagnetic waves, although the physical processes remain more than mysterious, even if they can be precisely calculated. Who would know how the movement of an electric field generates a magnetic field that does not even exist to begin with? In 1905, Albert Einstein realized that the effect of light on electricity - the photoelectric effect - required a different concept of light than that of a wave to explain it. It also had to show particle character, and even though Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for this, at the end of his life he said that fifty years of thinking had not given him an answer to the question of how to imagine a (massless) light particle (called a photon) with its spin and energy. In other words, light has become a mystery, and in this way Einstein has transformed something ordinary into something mysterious, thereby romanticizing the world. Moreover, no knowledge (information) about light can replace the associated imagination, and as far as the mythical dimension is concerned, we can read in the Bible, "let there be light", and with this command God's creation begins, in the course of which people have made light their own and celebrated it as enlightenment. Over the course of time, two dualizations of light have emerged: the duality of wave and particle and the possibility of both understanding it rationally and experiencing it mystically. The myth of light consists in the idea that the opposites can be overcome and that something like a mystical experience of unity can become possible. A similar example is the atom, because it shares the fate of light particles in the sense that it cannot be assigned an appearance and its stability can only be understood thanks to mysterious quanta that have the physical dimension of effect (energy times time) - which makes them even more mysterious!
"Science must be practiced as an art!"
