Get your towels ready. The first teaser for the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now online!
Waiting eagerly for 2005!
Dont Panic.
A famous philosophical question goes: If you can go back in time to a point where intelligent life was just starting on earth, what single piece of information would you like to leave back to help in faster and/or better development?
Some of the standard answers have been, information about God, the concept of atoms making up everything, and even Hari Seldon's encyclopedia of complete human knowledge.
Here is my humble take on the question. I would like to leave back nothing. I feel that it would be better to let a civilization learn from its own mistakes. There are always multiple ways of doing anything, and it would be better to start with a clean slate rather than having a biased view to begin with. Maybe if we start again from scratch, we might come up with a better explaination of how matter is formed, and even of God!
The same is probably also true with any kind of Research. When starting off with a new problem, it is always better to do some thinking and try to come up with your own solution instead of reading about related previous work (even if you end up duplicating effort). Of course, at some stage a literature survey would be necessary, but it is a very bad thing to start off with.
A couple of really amazing short stories by Arthur C. Clarke.
The first is titled The Nine Billion Names of God. I read this one a long time back, but immediately remembered it when I recently read another similar story by the same author.
Which brings us to the second short story. This is titled The Star (Thanks to arnab for the link).
Clark brings religion and science together beautifully. Both are extremely well written, and have surprise ending. There isnt much I can say about either that you wont get from simply reading them, so do that!
Another example of this religion-science-fiction literature is Contact by Carl Sagan. Though the movie was great, the book goes much deeper into the philosophy of everything. There is this scene in the book where a believer is proving his faith by standing in front of a giant pendulum. Science says that the pendulum should obey conservation of energy, and attain a certain height before it swings back. The argument here is that if this person stands closer than this distance to the pendulum, would God make it stop before it hits his face? And it so happens that just before the pendulum is about to be swung, the curator comes in and stops the "nonsense". Thus something intervenes!
There are sure to be other such interesting books/stories. I havent really read many others (I can think of another couple, but am too tired to look for references atm - maybe later).