Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done
As an aside, although Einstein did not espouse a religion, he was a very spiritual person. He said "I want to know the mind of God. The rest is all details." He also understood that good science is a blending of emotion and intellect. "The most beautiful experience we can have is mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is dead." From this perspective, the science presented in the definition which started this thread, is dead, lifeless. It leaves out the mystery and the wonder entirely. You should read/hear Dawkins. Ofcourse such the amazement won't get into the scientific papers, but you can see it in the popularising literature. Without the curiosity and imagination scientists don't get far - nobody would disagree with that - and it is all there in biomolecular science, medicine, astronomy, particle physics etc - there is no bits without wierd and wonderful stuff. Reality is as much fascinating than any man-made mystery can be. It is false to see spirituality as irrational. It is direct experience of the natural world. It is not self-delusion, it is seeing and observing in a different way. It is also a rational response to the limits of science to describe the world. It is not consistent with reality, therefore it cannot be and observation of it, at most it is the observation of the human psyche. And you have to have self-delusion to deny reality and to accept imaginary "reality". The rational response is: "we don't have enough data yet, let's collect some more before we make up our mind". Einstein was not a hypocrite when he made his statement about wanting to know the mind of God. For one thing he understood what Goedel understood, that a rational system that explains everything is a logical, mathematical possibility, for any rational system contains at least one element which is not explained within the system. That is Goedel's Theorem. Put intuitively, it means that to describe any system you must be able to stand outside it. But standing outside it, you are not defined by the system. Russell and Whitehead's theory of classes leads to the same result. Logically, a class cannot contain itself. For example, the concept of a set of chairs is logically different from the chairs themselves. That is why you cannot conceive of a class of all classes. And seeing as classification is the basis of science, it is logically impossible for science to describe all of nature - for to do that it would have to define and describe the class of all classes. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Prinicple says much the same thing - you cannot observe both the momentum and the position of a particle. You can clearly observe one or the other or a fuzzy combination, but not both clearly. There is thus an irreducible veil of ignorance that science cannot lift. For Einstein, Whitehead and Heisenberg, logically what lay behind that veil, was God - the unexplained and unexplainable cause of order in the universe. They came to this position because rationally they could reach no other conclusion, all rational explanations being exhausted. Einstein used kind metaphors. he was not relegious, we just had a thread on this on skeptic, do I have to relocate all that stuff? The uncertainty principle works on quantum states of particles, and has nothing to do with the frame of reference we have to work in our reality. You cannot build a philosophy on it. It doesn't mean we cannot approximate our reality better and better all the time, we know we can, lots of our science works very well indeed. Just because we cannot yet explain something, or because some stuff we can only work out in possibilities, doesn't mean there is a god lurking about. Use Occam's rasor - if there is no evidence for a god, why should we invent one just to conveniently fill the gaps of our ignorance? Bit lazy, init? We are alone, and that should make us more responsible for that brief moment we have a chance to enjoy our wonderful universe, to get to know it and make it better for everybody else. It is just an incredibly lucky coincidence that we are here - an unusually long break without any deadly gamma-ray explosion or something similar. Do the best you can. Life is more interesting and free and human/e without god. Common, the earth does look flat. People find it a tod more easy to believe it's roundness, when the circumnavigation becomes commonplace. The very cardinal who prosecuted Galileo fully understood what Galileo was saying. He accepted the Copernican system. Galileo was threatened with imprisonment, not because the Church did not agree intellectually with what he was saying, but because he would not keep quiet while it figured out how to integrate it into traditional teaching without losing control. The notion that the Church silenced him
Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done
But the "scientific" evaluation of how it works has all these metaphors and cultural assumptions embedded in it. They help determine what will be accepted as scientifically proven and what not. That is why Einstein repudiated statistical mechanics and Heisenberg accepted it. It had nothing to do with the experimental data, but with a deep philosophical difference of opinion on the nature of science and the scientifc method captured by Einsteins famous justification for repudiating statistical mechanics, that "God does not play dice with the universe." There is no empirical content in that statement. It is a statement of cultural values and belief. It is beliefs like that which shape how science is done and what is accepted as legitimate data and what not. Except that Einstein wasn't religious. And it doesn't matter what he thought - the majority of the scientist accepted the uncertainty /quantum stuff in a couple of decades, regardless of their cultural background, because there were more mounting evidence. Lots of scientists are religous and - for -me uncomprehensibly - manage to totally separate their irrational thinking from their rational thinking. For I think it needs a special self-delusion or, well, let's face it - hypocracy. Why did people cling to the Ptolemaic view of astronomy despite the contrary data from Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and even when Copernicus came up with a theory which matched their data ? For the best part of two hundred years ? Because it meant giving up an entire cultural world view and all the social values and power structures that went with it. Common, the earth does look flat. People find it a tod more easy to believe it's roundness, when the circumnavigation becomes commonplace. Information got round in those days even slower then now... But yes, people need the evidence and a bit of motivation to go for new ideas. However at some point the evidence becomes so ovepowering, that the new idea becomes just another fact of life. Statistical mechanics presents a similar challenge. It rejects the simple mechanical cause and effect arguments of the industrial culture in which progress is a value free term and can no more be denied than the earth can be prevented from circling round the sun. Progress is the equivalent in classical and neo-classical economics to gravity in Newtonian Mechanics. It is an anonymous, unexplained external force which governs everything and has the force of scientific truth. The whole of classical and neoclassical economics apes the classical scientific model. If classical science goes, so does neo-classical economics. Just as statisical mechanics requires the development of a new science in which the interdependence of observer and observed has to be expressly defined, so must an economics be developed in which this value neutral position which apes the independence of observer and observed in classical science, is dumped and in which values and human cultural intentionality is integrated (something which I had the impression you favour). not if it implies that it's some sort of static natural law that we can't do anuything about. Eva Mike [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done
I passed it on again, I hope you won't mind, those people seem to have time to read every article... I just respond to a few things: (Mike H.) It was methane that was detected on Pluto and in the tails of comets, according to Gold. methane is the very simplest CH compound. I belive astronomers found more complex stuff than that, but not any longer C chains. We have an astrochemistry department, I could ask... I know the difference between a theory and a hypothesis and the sentence quoted does not demonstrate such a confusion. Your reader also totally misses my point. People like Wegener and Gold are not merely told their data or their hypotheses are wrong - they are pilloried and vilified for decades. Certain metaphors or images or ideas come to dominate science and any contradiction is met with almost hysterical denial at times. This kind of behaviour is a clear indication of of the non-rational in science, which was the point I was trying to make. The non-rational is particularly important when it comes to creating original ideas - creativity is a marriage of intuition, emotion and rationality. Time after time, if you read the history of science and technology, ideas come to people as epiphanies at the most unusual and unexpected moments, not as a conscious result of systematic and conscious analysis of the data. The patterning typically happens in the unconsious. Poincare famously had one of his most important insights, quite unbidden, as he stepped off an omnibus, for example, though admittedly that was in mathematics, not science. Theories seem to surface when there are enough data/ information is hanging around. Doesn't matter how suddenly an idea surface, in the majority of cases if that particular chap hadn't see the light, there was somebody else quite near to it. (Wallace? start with w anyhow) In a very few cases some individuals indeed are "ahead of their time". Which means, that there are insufficient data around to convince the science establishment, which yes, can be a bit slow moving. However, relying on accumulated data, peer review etc seems to be a very good method (best) of working so far. Remember, the vast majority of ideas DO turn out to be wrong - which also is part of the constructive database identifying the areas where there is no need to look again. The old greeks had some astounding speculative ideas about dialectics and materialism, just to mention the two that impressed me most... but they also had a million of other such speculative ideas that did not work out... They had no chance of separating the valid from the wrong, they had no sufficient data, sufficient tools. As an example of a theory which did not arise from the data, take Darwinian evolution. Historians of science accept that Darwin got the idea from classical economics, from reading Malthus, if I remember correctly. Then when he went on his famous voyage on the Beagle, the biological data fell into alignment with the Malthusian idea in his mind. It is not even a true theory, by the way, it is a tautology. But it is politically incorrect to say in the hearing of biologists who are inclined (metaphorically) to stone you for it. I believe there was a chap around that also had the same general idea as Darwin. I also believe that his main stimuli for his theory came from his travels to sepaated habitats. Also his attempts to adapt his theory to human society was a complete failure. but let's see the skeptics response on this one, they are very much into Darwin... I can't figure why would the oil industry shun Gold's ideas - they are not interested in the science establishment, only in money, and new technology is not even involved. Eva
Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done
-Original Message- From: Eva Durant [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: list futurework [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: January 27, 1999 3:54 AM Subject: Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done [snip] I believe there was a chap around that also had the same general idea as Darwin. I also believe that his main stimuli for his theory came from his travels to sepaated habitats. Also his attempts to adapt his theory to human society was a complete failure. but let's see the skeptics response on this one, they are very much into Darwin... I believe you are thinking of Wallace here. If memory serves me, he was ready to publish a sketchy theory of evolution, and then got introduced to Darwin who was on the verge of publishing the much more massive "Origin of Species". My recollection on the matter of human societies is that Wallace was interested in language. Like most Europeans of his time, he expected that the language of a primitive people would be demonstrably more "primitive" than languages of "civilized" people. Wallace spent time among the Australian aboriginals, and to his credit realized that the data did not fit the theory. Wallace is usually cited in linguistics as an interesting precursor of Noam Chomsky whose generative grammar theories predict that all human languages will be equally complex because the ability to learn language is innate in the human species, versus structural linguistics which assumes that language is learned by simple association of ideas, which would lead to the assumption that some languages would be more "primitive" than others. Live long and prosper Victor Milne Pat Gottlieb FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/ LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
