Science! I’ve been
using that a lot recently. Science! With the exclamation mark. I think it’s a substitute for ‘you
moron’? Science, you moron. Ok, but answering that question simply raises
a new one; why the inflective? I think
it comes from my curiously continuing surprise, at the lack of thinking, awareness,
and knowledge of those whom I share my world with. Knowledge and the ability to think are the
two most important things a person can have.
It could be argued that love is the most important thing. The Beatles, and Richard Feynman, both
thought love is all you need, and frankly that is good enough for me. But the reason I discount it from qualities
I’m judging here is because you can’t measure love. It can’t be gained, or learned, not in a
formal setting anyway, and you can’t choose to have more love for something
arbitrarily. It seems beyond human
control, even if it is the most controlling force in humans. A fascinating subject but not the one I will
cover.
Well, not here.
Here I intend to outline why I am such a science junky,
why I apply the scientific method to all my decision making, and to an extent,
why I am confused that everyone doesn’t do that. I’ve tried to keep it down, but unfortunately
it’s already become a trilogy. During
the various drafts for this I kept slipping in to a Richard Dawkins-esk rage at
the irrationality of religion, but there won’t be any of that here; I will
split that in to a separate piece so that explanatory and the argumentative don’t
get in each other’s way.
So come on then, what’s the big deal with this science
and its way of viewing the world then?
Well, the world is huge, and amazing, it’s astounding and confusing and
overwhelming. Science gives
understanding; a path that can be found through the complexity. Rationality, once accepted, is powerful,
mostly as it provides an excellent way of filtering the vast amount of
half-baked nonsense that we are bombarded by.
A scientific mind-set allows the easy distinction between the factual
and the ridiculous. You can see how
religion kept creeping in to this? I
think that the most useful element that a rational viewpoint gives, is doubt.
That might sound very negative and pessimistic, but let
me be clear, not doubt of all things and people and an absence of hope. I refer to doubt of something until there is
reason not to doubt it. I doubt that
Omega3 does anything to my brain activity, I doubt that anti-oxidants affect
aging, I doubt that homeopathy does jack shit.
I doubt that neutrinos can travel faster than light, I doubt climate
change is a natural cycle, and I doubt that one doctor publishing results on
eleven children can overturn decades of research and show a link between
vaccination and autism. I doubt. I’m a doubter.
I continue to doubt until information arrives that
supports the claim that was originally made, though in all six of my example
this will never happen, as the information refuting them is legion.
Oh look a filter; easy peasy. Just disregard anything that doesn’t come
with supporting information, except how do you know if the supporting
information can be trusted? After all
each of my examples is backed up by some sort of information? Lots of magazine articles have been published
about how anti-oxidants mop up free radicals in the body. All sorts of people claim homeopathy has
worked for them, and the san Grasso lab in Italy is one of the most advanced and respected
particle physics institutes in the world, and they made the superluminal
neutrino claim.
The solution, which may seem to place us at the head of a
slippery slope, is to filter the information, which is not difficult. Information need only be considred in how it relates to exisitng information.
I’m now going to construct a visual metaphor, on paper,
which is a bold claim but here goes.
Many people think of science as a great solid impenetrable mass, a
stodgy great ball of facts and figures and rules and laws, and unless you
understand all of it you can’t make any sense of things.
I would suggest that we imagine an art installation, a
highly contemporary one; a multitude of fine wires criss-crossing through a
large room; sometimes meeting; often weaving round each other; some meeting
points have a few wires; others meet in great collections. From each of these meeting points, these
nodes, we suspend little lights. If we
turn the lights in the gallery off then it will look rather impressive I’m
sure.
The points were the wires meet are theories, I’m ignoring
the technical difference between theories and hypotheses here; each meeting
point is a scientific idea that can be tested and evaluated.
The wires are the interconnections between these ideas as
theories do not exist in isolation; they relate to each other, and support each
other, and not always in ways that are obvious.
The wires are not static either, they move and shift. New connections are formed, other connections
disappear. Sometimes a single wire is
replaced by many, spreading and twisting through the mesh.
The lights are information. Each showing the evidence that supports the
idea it is hanging from. Some nodes
would be dim with only a light of two; others would be great luminous orbs.
The whole structure would be constantly moving and
changing, a vibrant dynamic structure.
The wires move, nodes disappear and the lights move to new nodes. Theories can come and go as new experiments
and insights replaces them with improved ideas or shows them to be totally
wrong, but the little lights always just move as information is never
wrong. An observation, once made, with
care, is a fact and can never be in error.
A new measurement may be more accurate but that doesn’t invalidate the
previous measure, it simple documents the progress of precision.
So here we are with this great nest of ideas, sitting in
a tangle of wires, and punctuated by a myriad of tiny lights. It shifts and pulses and changes shape and
size as we watch it. It is this ever
changing and growing interconnectedness that I love. This is what draws me in. That ideas which seem to bear no relation can
be directly linked in ways we could not have predicted. That all knowledge is in
some way connected, sometimes by twenty lane mega highways and sometimes by
twisting back roads through hamlets of half-forgotten truths.
The hole in the ozone layer was not discovered, it was
predicted, by chemists investigating how the properties of a molecule changes
when one of the atoms in the molecule absorbs energy and then has to release
it. Chlorofluorocarbon in
the stratosphere absorbs energy from ultra violet light, releasing chlorine,
which starts a reaction that consumes ozone.
Their work was confirmed by atmospheric scientists, not ones studying Earth,
but studying Venus, which is rich in chlorine.
Only after that did environmental scientists make detailed measurements
of the actual effect. Different
scientists, from different disciplines, able to join their skills together on a
single problem.
Oceanographers taking core samples of the
seabed, to study the geological and biological history of the Earth, let
physicists do astronomy by studying the ratios of isotopic iron in the ancient
seabed, and show us that a supernova exploded within ninety light years of the
Earth five million years ago. Due to the
movement of the stars a telescope cannot provide evidence for that.
The way heat is persuaded to flow quicker
out of a microchip is copied from microscopic features found in biology. A better understanding of the weather in the
suns atmosphere has allowed us to control the two hundred million degree plasma
in fusion reactors by deliberately inducing instabilities that mimic a solar
prominence. The list is functionally
endless. And so is my fascination.
Whenever I am told something new I try and
insert it in to my own version of this tangled web. Does this new information fit; does it
contradict something I already know? We
return to doubt, or scepticism as it’s also known. I don’t take information at face value, I
take it at its real value, which may be zero until I’ve looked in to it a bit
more.
This fluid and moving tangle of filaments explains the whole
universe, and it corrects itself, and it absorbs, grows, and changes, as our
knowledge changes. We can measure the
age of the universe, explain the complexity of life, and predict the interaction
of the fundamental particles. We can
infer matter and energy undetectable to our current technology, and envisage
ourselves on the surface of worlds and moons far from our Earth, and design
novel forms of life from scratch.
That we can do all this is incredible and invigorating
and awe inspiring. That we can
understand the universe by the simple act of trying to understand the universe
never ceases to amaze.
It has been suggested that the non-scientific view point
is the more pleasing; that a religious or artistic eye can see beauty that
science destroys. Science is
reductionist and turns splendour in to a flow chart. I would argue against that (there is a flow
chart in part two, but it’s a beautiful one) and suggest science adds to the
simple beauty of nature. The scent of a
rose can stir my senses and the beauty
of its form is all too visible. But
knowing that these concentric rings of petals were formed by the iterative
application of a small set of genes, which were themselves formed by the iterative
application of natural selection, adds an additional layer of beauty; that the aesthetic
which is clear to my eye was self-forming by natural laws which I can
understand.
As Douglas Adams so beautifully put it (didn’t he
always?) I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
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