It amazes me, as I read Fire in the Mind, to learn just how these things we take for scientific knowledge come about. There are a few tenuous connections to observable reality, and from there it's all a house of cards.
Subatomic particles. Mathmaticians make equations to fit the data, but to make it all work, to explain some kink, the equation ends up factoring in some particle or other that hasn't yet been observed. There are quarks and muons and red, green, blue (and anti- of each color) and leptons and truth and beauty and up and down and charm and strange particles. After math predicts a particle, scientists design an experiment that would create (and instruments to detect) these particles. Except now there are particles in the equations that, for whatever reason, won't be detectable. But the equation works.
At the other end of the scale, you can use trigonometry to find the distance to the sun or to the moon, from earth. There are a few other celestial objects that can be measured from earth because the earth is so far from itself at one point in orbit from another. And from there on out it's all cards. Theories had to be revised because geologists had conflicting information based on more concrete data. This is the essence of the first two chapters of my book.
A few months ago, I read about how the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception came about. Short story, it was building the logical framework, story form, to support a belief that people wanted to hold. I was amazed to read this in a Catholic publication, and that other people didn't seem to see the meta-story.
In school, I enjoyed and did well with sociology and philosophy because I played like it was a game. It happens that I'm skilled at learning and working within a given logical framework. This is a game I'm learning to play at work - and my objective is to play their game such they give me what I want. I will win.
Life, rather than being a series of confusing dense mazes, is becoming a group of jungle gyms, each with a few point attachments to the ground, that I'm free to play on, or not, as I please. It's interesting to watch whole groups of knowledge be lifted into this new category. I get a sense of the direction my viewpoint is taking, and of its effects: life is going to be more (carefree, and) fun.
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3 comments:
Sounds really interesting! I like the analogy of the jungle gyms and that you're choosing the games to play.
Look forward to hearing more about how you're doing in the games/playground equipment.
Science isn't all about coming up with a mathematical equation, adding constants here and there to make things fit and pronouncing that you've figured it all out. It's a much more dynamic and messy process. You have two camps, the theorists and the empiricists, and those two camps are subdivided based on reductionism and holiscism. For example, most biological disciplines are mostly empirical because they are too complex to reduce mathematically (with the exception of classical genetics and population genetics), yet reductionism exists within them as well, because the empiricists are studying one aspect of their system, a regulatory network of genes, development of a fruit fly or worm, etc. Basically, organisms are too complex and scientists have to cripple or delete a part to see what effect it has on the organism they are studying. You start with a simple organism and see if what happens in it happens in a human. Physicists have a it a bit easier because they work on simpler systems (atoms or molecules). One can think of a physicist as an applied mathematician at heart. Yet, even physicists have their empiricists. Often, they develop a material in the lab like high temperature superconductors and then it's left to the theorists to figure how the material works at say the quantum level. But even at the quantum level one must simplify because the equations become too complex. Formaldehyde is the most complex molecule that can be described via quantum mechanics, yet you are made up of polymers of amino acids (proteins), nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), sugars (carbohydrates), vitamins and water. There is no way that quantum mechanics can be used to reduce a person or any organism to a collection of waves (a wave function) let alone just about any molecule in your body except maybe water, oxygen and CO2. The author you are citing is talking to mostly physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists who are affiliated with the bomb labs and the Santa Fe Institute. They are working on the sexy, cutting edge stuff such as emergent behavior in physical systems, and a lot of what they might come up with is just wrong, barely testable (crunched for months on a supercomputer simulation or 5 events out of a thousand runs on a cutting edge particle accelerator) or untestable currently (string theory). There are a few empirical fields that get it wrong almost as much as they get right (clinical medical research). A lot of science isn't sexy except to the people who love it for itself, and most people would find it tedious and boring and impractical. This is a failure of scientists to convey the wonder they find in nature to laymen, though there are exceptions (Feynmann, Asimov, Sagan, Darwin). When you read such literature, if it wasn't written by someone with a science background, you are losing information in the telling of the story. At the end of the day, the answer is yes, though. Atoms, particles, molecules are constructs to help us describe the world. Some of them, atoms and molecules, do a damn good job describing hat we see and experience, and they've been tested over and over. Yet, those theories relying on such constructs may yet be proven false or less true some day when we have accumulated even more knowledge. But even though Einstein described the Universe better than Newton, Newton's equations are good enough in most cases to get the job done be it building a building or getting a space probe to Titan. It's the exceptions when you invoke Einstein or Lorentz-Einstein.
Jon; I'm looking forward to it, too.
John, paragraphs will help my mental digestion :) I figured you'd have a lot to say, so I'm glad that you were okay with the basic premise.
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