Why I Don't "Believe" In Science... (Part II)

How many coffee cups are on the table?

So what about the dictionary.  All the words we use in any given day are in there along with their own unique definitions.  I argue this is like science - a self-defining system.  In fact, science is made up of words - from dictionaries mostly (though some define new things which are not yet in dictionaries) - and mathematics and algorithms.

The kilogram came onto existence between about 1795 and 1875 as science developed a more consistent means of defining weights and measures (as opposed to pounds, inches, and so on, for example).  But there is no universal constant that defines what a kilogram is.  Human's simply made it up.

Similarly for things like the meter and liter - made up.

In fact all this sort of definitional stuff, these words, are really just placeholders for concepts.  Just like words in a dictionary.  When you hear the word "dog" you think of a dog - it might be your dog, some dog, a dog you don't like, whatever.  But in general humans agree on certain aspects of dog.  Similarly, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a "dog" as "a highly variable domestic mammal (Canis familiaris) closely related to the gray wolf."  Googling "Canis Familiaris" brings up the Wikipedia "dog" page.


Having several dogs I know what they are.  But maybe you don't - in which case the dictionary and Google aren't going to do much to help you out.  Perhaps a picture would - perhaps you've seen a dog - but perhaps not.


So at the very bottom of science we have words like "dog" and "kilogram" for which definitions do not do justice - they are really just made up concepts (is a wolf a dog?)


The next thing in science is to apply mathematical concepts to these made up entities.  For example, a thousandth of a kilogram is a gram, or 1 g x 1,000 = 1 kg.  We don't say 1 dog x 1,000 = 1 kilodog though because "dog" is not a "scientific" word (though in some parts of the world it might make sense to ask for "a half a dog..."


The scientific words are typically tied up with observations.  For example, gram, as I mentioned last time, is a cubic centimeter of water with various properties of temperature and so on.  So to figure out what a kilogram is we must observer the details of a gram of water.


But really because we cannot make exact things out of atoms, because we cannot ensure that our water is not polluted by some contamination, we cannot count atoms reliably, and so on we are only guessing at what a cubic centimeter of water is, and hence guessing at kilogram as well.


Now of course over the last few hundred years man has worked hard at refining these guesses - improving the accuracy of the kilogram as I mentioned last time.


The same is true for other kinds of science as well.  The speed of light, for example.  We "know" its speed is 299,792,458 meters per second.  But we also "know" that, according to relativity, gravity bends light.  So does the light we see (or generate in experiments) get "bent" by the gravity we live in?  Does it affect our calculations?  Of course it does.  So we make more adjustments.

But all these tweaks and adjustments are done to bring things mathematically into line with what we observe.  For example, for a long time Einstein's view the of the universe governed everything - until our observations of the universe seemed not to work out.  Then we invented "dark matter" (which has been around a long time) to make our observations work out better.  And so on...

Now things like physics, astronomy, and other similar fields all rely on both our definitions of mass and distance.  Since they are made up and don't conform to things in the physical world its hard to say how accurate they really are:  One earth mass is 5.9722 x 1^24 Kg.

But things fall out of space onto the earth all the time - and gases in the atmosphere, like Helium, zoom off into space on their own all the time.  So is this really an "accurate" value?  If we base the "mass" of the solar system on earth masses won't there be more error?  And the weight of the galaxy on the number of stars (billions) which we cannot count times the number of solar system weights which we have guessed at to come up with errors that require us to invent dark matter...

Personally I like to think of the world made up of "countable" things and statistics instead of all of this.  Countable things are like the number of coffee cups on my dining room table: one.   The number of dogs in the house: four.  These are measurable things - albeit simple minded.

Now how many other people are in the house besides me?  This is a statistic.  I might think Mrs. Wolf is the only other person in the house but she is asleep in another room - maybe she went to the store and I didn't know - or maybe a burglar is in the house.

For that matter, maybe there's a second coffee cup on the dining room table under the laundry - does that count?

Now in a mathematical sense I can always "know" that 1 + 1 = 2 because humans have "defined" it to be that way (and humans have invented other kinds of mathematics where that isn't true).  So I can "know" that if there was a second cup of coffee on the table I would have two cups instead of one.

So science is the "observation" that there is one (or maybe two if I look) cups on the table.  Mathematics tells me how to count them up.

So just like the problem of self definition in science we have the problem of the "missing observation."  Similarly a dictionary defines all the words people will know at the time they develop some new concept that's not in the dictionary.  Up to a point in time there was only "atom" in the dictionary.  But then "electron" was added after some effort scientifically and electron was defined in terms that already existed, i.e., as a part of an atom.  The electrons were always there - we just couldn't "see" them.

As humans develop better and better tools they can observe more details and make better theories.

This is why Newtonian physics falls out of favor over time.

So science is really about finding the extra coffee cup.  I might think one thing before I find the second one, another after I find the second one.  Yet nothing in science would allow me to "predict" that the second one was present.

(But this does open up the possibility of me getting "information" about a second cup from another source, e.g., Mrs. Wolf asking "where's my coffee" and leading me to surmise there is another cup on the table.  In general science is about actual observations and not "getting information" through some indirect means.  More on this in a future post...)

I could build a detector that "sniffed out" ceramics and it might sniff out the second cup - but what if the second coffee cup is made of wood or glass?

Hard science (physics, astronomy, etc.) is only ever as accurate as its best observations.  Things like mathematics and algorithms can be applied to these observations to create theories.  But since they are not physical their precision and accuracy does not scale.

We can think of our place in the scientific world as like being in the center of trillions of bubbles - where each bubble is some kind of observation.  The closer to the center we get the more bubbles (repeatable observations) there are.  As we get toward the edges of our "bubble cloud" there are fewer observations.

So at the center we might have simple observations: we let go of a ball and it falls.  At the edge we might have observations about dark matter.

The center of the bubble cloud is more familiar because its comprised of things we constantly observe every day.  The edges not so familiar because we don't observe those things much if at all.

As time goes by humanity makes the bubble cloud bigger by adding more observations.  Two hundred years ago there were no observations about relativity (but there were "unexplained" observations that required more complex theories in order to account for them) but today there are many so that part of the cloud is thicker and more comfortable.

But we must remember that just because we have a lot of observations does not mean that something is fully understood.  There is a big difference between actual understanding and having a lot of observations we take for granted.

People often confuse "a lot of observations" and "some mathematics that's predictive" with "we know everything" about some topic.

What I "believe" about science is that much of what we think we "know" today will change - not so much the observations but the reasons for what we see - the "why" behind it.  Today's science will be superseded with "better knowledge" as more observations are made.   We will develop better or different reasons for the observations we have made.  We might learn that our observations were in fact incorrect for some reason.

This is the process of science and human understanding: change.

Since the "change" of science is unpredictable - no one foresaw relativity, for example - how can anyone "believe" that science will "explain everything."  We don't even know (nor apparently can we predict) what it will explain next, much less that it will explain something in particular.  Or even if it will explain something in a way we can understand...