A few months ago I read Charles Seife's excellent book, "Sun in a bottle: The strange history of fusion and the science of wishful thinking." One thing I found charming about the book was that it lumped crackpot cold fusion, nutty plans to use H-bombs to carve out artificial harbors in Alaska, and mainstream tokomaks into the same category: wildly-hyped but unsuccessful promises to change the world. The "wishful thinking" framing seems to fit all these stories pretty well, much better than the usual distinction between the good science of big-budget lasers and tokomaks and the bad science of cold fusion and the like. The physics explanations were good also.
The only part I really disagreed with. On page 220, Seife writes, "Science is little more than a method of tearing away notions that are not supported by cold, hard data." I disagree. Just for a few examples from physics, how about Einstein's papers on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect? And what about lots of biology, chemistry, and solid state physics, figuring out the structures of crystals and semiconductors and protein folding and all that? Sure, all of this work involves some "tearing away" of earlier models, but much of it--often the most important part--is constructive, building a model--a story--that makes sense and backing it up with data.
- Log in to post comments
""Science is little more than a method of tearing away notions that are not supported by cold, hard data.""
That's a very odd way of putting it. Science, as you say, builds up information by gathering the 'cold hard data' (and to be honest some of it is a little softer and warmer than perhaps it could be).
Also the 'little more than' is blatently incorrect. Science is a gathering of the data as well, no matter what it does to the notions afterwards. Most of my time working in science so far has been exclusively spent gathering data, rather than trying to turn it into anything else.
Hi Andrew,
You are right, of course. There is more to the scientific method than just the deductive "tearing away" parts. There is the abductive part. As you said, the "constructive, building a model part" of the scientific method.
But Feynman said the sole test of knowledge is experiment. So I would have said experiment is the most important part of the scientific method. After all, abduction is technically a logical fallacy. Who wants the most important part of science to be a fallacy? :-)
George
The "tearing away" characterization has roots, I would guess, in the idea that science proceeds via revolution as proposed by Kuhn. But I've found this explanation - as well as the "reductionist" explanation inadequate as an elevator-pitch explanation of how science works.
Frank Wilczek ( http://www.frankwilczek.com/ )offers the most useful and complete alternative, I think. He sees science as a process of analysis and synthesis. Synthesis is a good word, as it is constructive, but allows for the tossing out of the parts that don't fit.
While not quite on the same topic, I wrote recently about natural history v. explanatory models in computational biology, neither of which would be "tearing away" in the sense that Seife would seem to mean.
To be fair, he's probably just trying to cut to the bottom-line in sound-bite fashion aiming at that in the end of the day evidence-based testing decides. (This isn't what Nick thinks! Oh, well...)