The biologist Olivia Judson says that science is about a lot more than mere measurements. Excerpt:
I mention this because science is usually presented as a body of knowledge -- facts to be memorized, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, discoveries to be applauded. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions.One is that science is about what we know. One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science -- as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote -- creates an "expanding frontier of ignorance," where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier -- this peering into the unknown -- is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.
The second misconception that comes from this "facts, facts, facts" method of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical "creep"; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation.
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The thing is, if anyone can figure out what comes next, they probably figured it out years ago. Current scientific theory is extended well past what is proven, and each proof is just a refinement of what people figured out a while back.
It's sorta like rafting down a river taking GPS measurements...at any given point, you can pretty much guess the next dozen measurements, and a tiny bit of observation will show you the next mile of river even if you don't know exactly the lat/long it will turn out to be.
So there's no real 'OH WOW' moment for most of science. Scientists see bends coming well before they get to them. And they know roughly what they can't see yet and when they'll be able to see it.
It's not even 'facts, facts, facts'. It's 'possible slight refinement of facts, possible slight refinement of facts, possible slight refinement of facts'. It is amazingly boring and tedious.
But sometimes people leap out of the river and run in some other direction, and sometimes, rarely, stumble across some other river.
And, despite what Olivia Judson says, doing this, and discovering a new river, is actually pretty rare compared to the rest of science. It's just a lot more important than the rest of it combined. (Because, frankly, anyone can measure the existing river that everyone knows about.)
There is a knowledge frontier that is continually expanding outward. Everything within it is known fact, everything outside it is unknown, otherwise referred to as "supernatural".
One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null term. One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Sin lies in the causing of harm to others. All other sin is invented nonsense.
Science is a process which uses a number of tools in the hope of finding out how things work and where the processes that cause them come from. The more we learn about the universe, the more we learn that the math is not the territory but the map may be.
Re: science -- as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote -- creates an "expanding frontier of ignorance,"
That may be true as far as detail>/i> is concerned (especially about complex systems - biological and mechanical), but we are close to having most of the forces and particles figured out. Yes, there are a few more to produce (or show can't exist), but it really has been a triumph of science over the last 400 years in describing these fundamental elements of nature.
DavidTC,
Really?! What a horrifically sad view of modern science you have. Are you a trained scientist?
I agree that much of the work can be pretty tedious, but then Thomas Edison could have told us that. How many tries before he nailed the light bulb? I think that we have too many hagiographies about scientists such as Darwin, Pasteur, Marie Curie and the gang. Try to place yourself on the HMS Beagle for Darwin's journey. The stench of sailors who bathed infrequently, the tedium of long months at sea, worms in the meat and flour, a small and cramped vessel...He probably would have agreed with your assessment some days.
The truth is that it is the TYPE of discovery that has changed. The age of the independent researcher alone in his/her lab is pretty much over. Even then, for every scientist such as Griffith, who discovered the principle of cell transformation, there were thousands whose work is unknown to us. Hershey and Chase discovered that it was DNA and not protein that was the genetic material. How many protein biochemists barked up the wrong tree.
It has ever been thus in science. These blind alleys need to be explored and then closed out. It gives the field a general direction toward new discovery.
You are correct in that much of what is done today consists of charting the next bend in the river. However, today's discoveries are often the result of people with great powers of synthesis. Those who look at what everyone has looked at, and seen what no one else has seen:the very essence of discovery.
Yes, Ramon y Cajal discovered much in neuroanatomy. However, pick up Eric Kandel and Scwartz's Principles of Neurophysiology, and see the stunning beauty and complexity of the nervous system, as represented by thousands of collective years of human research over the past century.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek may have been the first to visualize cells in 1668, but pick up Bruce Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, and marvel at the tens of thousands of collective years of research in the last century, the absolutely mind-blowing complexity of the average cell with its 30+ thousand genes and tens of thousands of coordinated biochemical reactions.
Then consider how far we have advanced medicine as a result. Look at how we are bringing cancer to its knees, how HIV is increasingly becoming a disease that can be managed over decades as a chronic illness, and not a death sentence. Look at our ability to genetically engineer microbes to produce human hormones such as insulin and growth hormone.
What van Leewenhoek, Darwin, and Pasteur would have given to live in this age and be able to manipulate nature as we do, to share in the knowledge we have, to sit with just one graduate textbook.
Even Paul Simon got it 20 years ago in "Boy in the Bubble"
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry
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