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BGonline.org Forums
OT: Who's your chemical daddy?
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: OT: Who's your chemical daddy? (mamabear)
Date: Saturday, 14 June 2008, at 4:21 a.m.
I will agree with what Mr. Boyle has to say as long as he stays within the bounds of science,
That was M. Lavoisier's opinion, not Mr. Boyle's (sorry if the presentation was unclear), and one of many: the philosophy of science did not begin with M. Lavoisier, nor did the practice of chemistry end with him. But it would be a serious misreading of M. Lavoisier to suppose that his science or modern science consists of only the most certain of facts tediously compiled by timid cloistered men in white coats lacking in both imagination and logic. On the contrary: the best scientists have both imagination and logic in bountiful supply, which is precisely why, "using incomplete knowledge and reasonable suppositions," science continually "extend[s] [the boundaries of knowledge] beyond what is known."
That a civilization that used only science ... would have been wiped out by the neighboring one who built the first bronze foundry is a curious statement, because it is precisely backwards: to continue with the same metaphor, only a civilization that used science, however primitive, could ever build a foundry, discover the "right proportions" for mixing copper and tin (and zinc, or aluminum, or silicon), make ever better products, and figure out how to improve equipment and make it work. In our brief human history, only a scientist could discover that our planet does not lie at the center of the universe; that stars are suns; that humans are animals evolved from animals, that our planet, solar system and universe are almost unimaginably old. Only a scientist would have had the audacity to theorize that eons of geologic time build and destroy mountaions, that immovable continents move, that atoms could be split, that rockets could fly above the heavens to the Moon and Mars and beyond.
The ancients knew the power of steam, but the first industrial steam engine wasn't invented until 1698. A commercially successful model followed in 1712. Plenty of those early models blew up, less after James Watt added a separate condensor in 1765 and a centrifugal governor in 1788. A few years later, the first steamboat that Robert Fulton built sank. That didn't stop him; his next boat was a commerce success. Scientists -- call them engineers if you like, but they were not magicians and not meditators -- scientists practicing science built those inventions. None of them were lacking in logic and imagination.
Here and there one can read that "science" is severely limited in scope and methodology, that all scientists can do is hypothesize and experiment, rigidly bound by what we were taught in grammar school was "the" scientific method. Wrong, and wrong. Simon Singh's excellent book The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (HarperCollins, 2004) concludes by quoting the answers of dozens of scientists to the question "what is science?" It is a question with many answers, but what is clear is this: What do scientists study? Anything they can. As Bertrand Russell observed nearly 100 years ago, fields once in the domain of theology and philosophy and "natural theology" have, one by one, found new homes under the banner of science as empirical knowledge in those fields has expanded. How do scientists proceed? Not by rote rules of "the" scientific method, but in any way that works. What, ultimately, do scientists produce? A public body of objective knowledge, which welcomes the assault of reason by anyone and everyone, and is indifferent to ideology. If it could speak, it would not drone "I am the last word, do not question me"; it would shout "show me to be wrong, with facts and evidence and logic -- have at it!"
Science discovers objective facts and explains them according to the best available knowledge with coherent theories, any of which -- both fact and theory -- any good scientist ought cheerfully to admit may be wrong, and ought willingly throw out just as soon as better theories come to better fit better known facts. If ever you hear someone pooh-pooh well-supported theory as "just a theory," you are listening to someone who does not understand why we bother to formulate theories in the first place: it is because theories explain facts.
200 years ago, Lavoisier railed against the mumbo jumbo of alchemists and the ignorance of philosophers who presumed to practice science without ever questioning sacrosanct underlying principles of nature, thoughtlessly received for generations, handed down from curious and inventive but ultimately ignorant Greek philosphers two millennia dead.
What scientists have in common is this: a belief that the universe makes sense; that it is to a great extent knowable; and that it is what it is. Science does not proceed by fitting reality to unquestionable preconceptions and inerrant beliefs. Science does not make the world; it discovers it, and when our hypotheses and theories and beliefs do not match what we have discovered it is the beliefs, not the world, that must bend to accommodate newfound knowledge.
Since whatever science produces is public, open and welcoming of rational criticism of its factual findings and theoretical constructs, it is frustrating and often quite pointless to argue with those who refuse to subject their empirical claims to the test of empirical scrutiny. Curiously, some of them are often very quick to accept science whenever its findings do support their most cherished notions.
A recent letter writer to my local newspaper "proved" that global warming could not possibly cause sea levels to rise. His "proof" was that if you fill a pitcher with ice and water, and place the pitcher on a counter, and let the ice melt, the pitcher does not overflow. Another writer "proved" that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. His "proof" was that carbon dioxide makes up less than 0.1% of Earth's atmosphere, but 95% of the atmosphere of Mars, and Mars is very cold. And another writer, about two months ago, "proved" that global warming is a hoax. His "proof" consisted of ignoring most evidence and twisting the rest, a quick nod to unnamed "scientists" whose uncited opinions outweighed the rest, a dash of fact-free ad hominem, a shrug for "someone else's problem," a claim that everyone but him was "politicizing" the issue, and an unstated assumption that one person's opinion indifferent to all fact was just as good as anyone else's. Of the three writers to our newspaper, I must say that it was the third that made me laugh, since I'd just the day before read exactly the same formulaic argument in an online forum.
"Every man," Bertrand Russell wrote, "wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting conventions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." How true that is, of him, of me, of scientists, too, of participants in the casual and ephemeral conversations which, often, engage the most superficial aspects of opinions but never touch their underlying foundations. Facts, unmindful, refuse to go away. If we can't even agree that questions of fact can only be answered with evidence, what remains to discuss? The beauty and efficacy of science lie in its unceasing reminder that no convention however comforting, no tradition however old, no ideology however uniformly accepted is immune to question, reflection and revision, or impervious to reality's obstinate insistence that, believe what one will, reality doesn't care.
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