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Posts tagged with "science"

More science, religion, ethics, and peer reviews

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It seems to be science week at the Debates & Discussions forum, and of course I couldn't resist butting in, be it peer-reviewed sinful science, or the study of armageddon.

Entering a dark age of innovation

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I came across this report on a study by Jonathan Huebner showing that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down, and that by this rate we will be down to the Dark Ages level by 2024 (a curiously precise prediction, but presumably by comparing the technological advances of the millennium 500-1500 with the current trend).

There is no doubt this study is seriously flawed, the data picked can be seen as arbitrary and even misleading, but it is no more flawed than the other hypotheses and studies around. Self-styled futurists tend to be highly myoptic. It is a natural phenomena, you are highly aware of the changes happening to you, but less to to your parents and their parents' parents. In particular I admit a strong scorn of the singularitons claiming our world will enter a technological apocalypse in the near, but conveniently distant, future. My claim is that revolutionary, paradigm shattering, Oedipal changes are getting rarer as we live a longer productive life. Of course that is far from the whole story, but over time extrapolations always fail.

In a particular area the field may be stable or stagnant for a long time, experience rapid technological growth, and then fade into the background. This can be seen in the ages, we have had the non-starters of the Atomic Age followed by the Space Age, with the more successful Information Age which too will fade. The myoptic bias is to count the changes that are important to us now, and discount the changes that were important to us then, or will be in the future. We will have no greater problems living in our future than our predecessors have living in our present, as long as we can adjust to that change in focus. All that changes fast now will change slowly in the future.

New scientists and old religions

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The same issue of New Scientist had a report from an evangelical rationalist science congregation, under the theme of the atheists strike back.

But my question is: Is this good for science? Richard Dawkins' foundation, based on much the same idea, is discussed in the forums, the God-gutting comment in my previous post also elicited a reaction.

The next fifty years: it is all in the mind

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My magazine of choice, (The) New Scientist, released its first issue 50 years ago, and more recently followed up with a hefty anniversary issue.

Reading news (or watching or browsing them for that matter) is a waste of time if you want to be informed or enlightened. I have argued before that instead of following flickering interpretations of what just happened it is better to use sources like New Scientist get an insight into what is going to happen.

Self-conscious at 50, New Scientist looked backwards for its New Zeitgeist in news articles past, as well as forward in inviting predictions for the following 50 years. While both are good reads, true to form it is the present, in the "Big Questions", that this issue shines. One present but unasked question is the role of science itself.

A test to determine the kind of action a scientific branch has is to look at the reaction. Since the time Galileo run afoul of his pope astronomy has annoyed nobody (well, dark astronomy annoyed me, which shows promise). The last public uproar based on physics were the anti-nuclear demonstrations in the 80's. There may be sufficient smokestacks left to give chemistry a bad name, but this is not where the battles lie. Meanwhile information has been the most recent inclusion into the physical system, and with the widest impact the last few decades. That notwithstanding all the theory was fairly established by the time the first issue of New Scientist was published, and thereafter nothing much has happened, and not that much is going to happen either.

Advances in physical science and computer science is now in the realm of usability studies and market research. It is no longer iconoclastic in nature, fundamental world views are no longer turned over by breakthroughs in physics. We will probably never return to the rapid and fundamental advances in the golden era of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The physical sciences are a part of the establishment. Einstein is an icon, and we use quantum physics when we try to understand the world. If you observe two connected butterflies causing a storm a cat will die while staying alive, therefore if something is sufficiently garbled it is scientifically proven.

Biology on the other hand is upsetting. Christians largely in USA and Muslims largely outside of USA are rallying against Darwin, in a truly impressive display of rear-guard action. What other scientific theory of that venerable age can still muster the troops this way? But it isn't just the implicit threat to creation myths that gets us going. Genetic engineering, cloning, stem cell research... You name it, we protest against it.

Back to the big questions and the long forecasts. With some exceptions we were relieved of the hyperbole. Fifty years is not a long time, half a lifetime or thereabout. The world in the 1950s was very different in flavour to ours, but it wasn't truly alien. The world in 2050 won't be either. The forecasts in physics were largely completist in nature, reminiscent of card collectors, "if we just got these two missing cards we're complete". Based on past experience we will learn more if this completition project fails, but in any case an uninspiring outlook for us non-collectors.

I am much more enthralled that we are well on our way to discovering our past. Thanks to the invention of writing we have known tales from the past for quite many generations now, but what about the unwritten stories? Fossils may be among the oldest things around, but they have been new to us. As Andrew Knoll noted, most of the the artifacts of life and civilization remain in the ground undiscovered, but fifty years from now most will have been found. Non-intrusive survey methods will cover all the land mass as well as the seas. Digging for artifacts and fossils will not be the only way of inquiry. From the human genome project of the last decade, the neandertal genome project is well on its way. We are set to discover not only who we are but how we got to be, much of it from archelogical evidence in living genes in addition to communing with the recent dead.

Applied biology is provocative enough. But when it really goes home to ourselves it will be hard to ignore. Several of the articles touched the fleeting worry that when science has disposed of free will the way it did to phlogiston or the aether, what would prevent us from doing harm as it isn't our fault anyway?

This is reminiscent of when 18th and 19th century science gutted God good, the raised concern was how a society could survive and prosper without the fear of God to scare people into subordination. As you know we still turned out pretty allright. Demystifying our own behaviour will not make us into irresponsible people even though in a deeper sense we aren't responsible for ourselves. Put the other way around proving the illusory existence of self would not turn previously selfish people any more selfless. I may not exist but I still want that car.

The scientific value of being wrong

This post is also a part of a forum discussion.

Fred Hoyle commented that it makes more sense to be unorthodox than orthodox in science. I fully agree with that. If a thousand people are looking in one direction and you are looking in another, more will be found in the orthodox direction but you have a much higher chance of discovering something yourself.

The reason why scientists and wannabes goes "oh no, not again" whenever a pseudo-scientific idea crops up is that there are so many of them, the idea is so nebulous, and the proponents are almost incapable of admitting to themselves that they might be wrong no matter the argument or method. This reaction is perfectly natural but in excess it is damaging. It doesn't help that to successfully promote a scientific theory you have to be pretty thick-skulled, and that doesn't go well with admitting defeat. Like other human beings scientist tend to cling to their convictions until they die.

I would claim that the crackpot has more of the scientific nature than the hangers-on that use science as a religion, defending science from people daring to but its body of work in doubt. Not for nothing does science use terms like theory and model, while terms like law and proof have been quietly shown the back door. However following the crackpot is hardly the road to success either. That the majority is always wrong does not imply that the minority is right. One of the roles of science is as myth-maker. Why are we here? Where do we come from? Where do we go? This is a strong crackpot attractor, but science also has a practical and pragmatic role. Will this work? What can we use this for? This is what separates crack science from crackpot science.

I think cold fusion was a very instructive example. The research had all the indications of bad science, and was proved to be nonsense. But the huge story in the middle of it is not nonsense, the idea of (nearly) unlimited energy (nearly) for free. There is a distinct possibility that a breakthrough could abruptly cure all our energy woes. It breaks with our conditioning, the idea of getting something valuable for free. Though when something gets free it isn't valuable any more, and soon will be taken for granted. Worse, this is dangerous territory for any self-respecting scientist as it is hard to separate good science from bad, and it will be crowded with bad science. This will work when the alchemical mix is right, or under favourable phases of the moon.

Much of the bad science has been epicycles created by scientists themselves ("epicycle" is commonly used as a disparaging term for extra crutches used for a scientific theory to work). That includes the mystical ether. 19th century science needed ether to be able to explain light as to their knowledge waves always travelled through a medium, like water waves, and thus there had to be some medium between us and the light-giving sun.

When I was younger and more starry-eyed I considered a pursuit in astrophysics and I am glad I didn't. It is hard to do experimental cosmology and in my opinion astronomy is currently in disarray, full of dark energy and dark matter and epicycles upon epicycles. This on the other hand is a good career opportunity for a scientist. When something is obviously broken you can make a name for youself if you can fix it (or in this case fixing parts of it).