I had a sort of insight about Science and the MOQ,
or rather "Science, Pirsig, MOQ and History" that I'd
like to share with you as a hypothesis for discussion.
Ever since I read Z&AMM I've been puzzled about
Pirsig's views on Science; later, in the course of
discussions in this Forum, I realized that his views
had been adopted by many of the people here. What
puzzled me more is that the last version of Z&AMM was
finished about 1972, close to the end of the 20th
century and yet Pirsig's views seem to me closer to
Science as presented in the first decades of that
century. How come? Considering how radically Science
changed in those 50 or 60 years, that's quite a gap.
The other day I was rereading Norbert Wiener's
book 'Cybernetics'. The book was first published in
1948; Claude Shannon's papers on "A Mathematical
Theory of Communication" also date from that year.
Wiener's ideas had been making inroads, mainly in
Biology, some years before that. By the 1960's the
concepts behind "Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine", as Wiener subtitled his book,
were the darling baby of both Science and pseudo
Science; everyone busy working out how Wiener's,
Shannon's (and Prigogine's) ideas and, what became
later known as Informatics, could modify their
particular fields. Not to mention that statistical
treatments for most of Physic's theories were already
firmly in place by, say, the 1910's.
All the above conformed a true revolution in
our understanding of the external world of Science and
yet, hardly a word about it in Pirsig's books. His
views on Science seemed to have stayed frozen as those
prevalent before the 30's.
The hypothesis I offer for discussion is roughly
this: Pirsig's formative years in Science were
precisely the 1930's. Now, one can have his formative
years of a discipline in one period and continuously
modify what was learnt, 'provided' (and that's an
important proviso) one keeps himself close to that
discipline; otherwise one's conceptions remain sort of
frozen in time.
With the help of Ian Glendinning's "R.
Pirsig's Biographical Timeline" I tried to retrace
what might have happened. Pirsig studied Chemistry at
the University of Minnesota in 1944. I have no idea
what Minnesota's Freshman's courses were like then,
but a safe bet was the Science they taught was pretty
much that of 10 or 20 years before (nothing
particularly wrong with Minnesota, 'that was the way
it was' in most Universities then). In 1946 he joins
the Army and since then, till the time he wrote Z&AMM,
there's no indication in the above timeline that he
ever came close to Science again.
I browsed in the Library through some Physical
Chemistry textbooks for undergrads published about the
40's and surely, there it was: - forces and energies
and particlesÂ… Classical Mechanics all over the place.
Forces of cohesion, of adhesion, osmotic forces,
surface forces (tensions). Ubiquitous forces and
energies and 'tendencies'Â… Ever wondered where
language expressions such as "the forces of cohesion
that hold a society together" came from?
All the former should not be taken to imply that
Pirsig was "Wrong" about Science; he was Right in the
criticism of Science as he knew it. As I said, unless
you keep very much inside one discipline, it is easy
to loose track of innovations. This, needless to say,
is no excuse for the younger set of members here that
seemed to have adopted Pirsig's views on Science quite
uncritically.
__________________________________________________________
Sent from Yahoo! Mail.
The World's Favourite Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
