Steve Jones’ Scientific Smackdown
June 9, 2011
This is a follow up to the post “Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture”.
It appears that Prof Cox’s increasingly bombastic dismissal of universes beyond his own conception brought attention from Britain’s scientific senior class and a public rebuke (if you know what to look and listen for).
I was listening to Radio Four’s BAFTA award winning Infinite Monkey Cage (Series 4, Part 1). Its an engaging piece of pop-sci co-hosted by the ubiquitous Prof Cox and Robin Ince (a British stand-up comedian). Its usually funny in a nerdy kind of way. But this time the guest, Prof Steve Jones, one of the UK’s scientific grandees shoved Prof Cox’s head down the toilet and flushed repeatedly.
Unlike Cox, Jones recognises the limits to science and science’s role in discovery of knowledge AND truths. His is a mature and humble perspective on humanity’s role in the universe. Based on current scientific knowledge he estimated (or quoted estimates) that ‘we’ understand to a good degree 1/10^120 of the universe. That is the inverse of ten to the power of 120 or 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of all matter in the universe.
Put in that perspective modern physics, though undoubtedly a powerful AND truthful representation of the known universe, actually knows almost none of the universe and therefore remains in its own terms mainly composed of theories and partial evidence.
We only have to look at our understanding of how DNA operates or how a planet forms to see how close to home the unknown resides and in turn to appreciate our personal contexts. I don’t mean for this to suggest that scientific progress is not the most relevant or most successful mechanism that humanity has to better understand its own context, rather that science has a perspective that is per force both limited and directional (with time). In contrast the human mind has the power to reject time as an argument and work outside the historical context of scientific development. One only has to look at science fiction authors such as Verne, Wells or Clarke to see that value in expressing an imagined future, deeply unscientific though it is. If our minds can do away with a fundamental, universal variable with almost no effort and invent limitless and coherent internal universes, how can that be seen as any less powerful that the collective experience of scientific progress.
Anyway, if you get the chance to listen to this radio show listen for the negative space, the things unsaid and watch for the looks exchanged to find a young, brash, star-spangled scientist getting a lesson from the wise old wizard.
Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture
December 31, 2010
I like Brian Cox’s programs. He has an engaging style and an obvious passion for cosmology but he was inconsistent with his own arguments within his own recent Huw Weldon lecture and did nothing to enhance is reputation as a commentator outside his own area of expertise.
As someone who is investigating aspects of the philosophy of science his blanket dismissal of the academic understanding of scientific understanding was disappointing. Yes, the Sokolian viewpoint that the scientific worldview has proven to be a superior worldview over others in explaining our physical universe is undoubtedly true, but to then go on to say that it should never be challenged is not a valid position for an academic to take. It doesn’t matter if post-modern interpretations of science have any real-world meaning or not because science and the scientific method themselves are human inventions.
If we take the ultimate argument of Godel’s incompleteness theorem as applied by po-mo researchers – that full knowledge about the pursuit of an area of understanding can never be attained from within that area of understanding. There is no part of Godel’s theorem that allows or even suggests that it can be applied outside an oblique area of mathematical proof, but it rings true in human experience. The people we know with the deepest subject knowledge are also the blindest to the consequences of that knowledge. The deep passion that Prof Cox has for starlight is not the same deep passion for starlight that the lover has for the light that cast across the face of the loved. There is no better or worse, but there is different. In dismissing different ways of understanding we reduce the imagined to the possible and the possible to the probable and so down to the actual.
Now the actual may in fact be perfectly wonderful in its own right, and I might suggest that in choosing cosmology and sub-atomic physics as his subject area Prof Cox has chosen well, but what about more mundane pursuits. The fluid dynamics of sewerage systems for example (sorry Spenser) will never attract ex-pop stars and yet is one of the basics of modern urban existence. It could be every bit as complex to comprehend with chaotic flows of different fluids interacting on both a physical and a chemical basis to bring good or harm to millions of people every day. But you would have to be heartless in the extreme not to allow the workers in that sector to imagine the smell away or that chunkiness in one stream is just chunkiness. And yet that is what Prof Cox is asking for when he wishes to dismiss a super-position of alternate understanding on science and scientific progress.
The thing is though, later in his lecture he performs a complete about-face with no apparent recognition that he is contradicting himself. He yearns for the leaps in imagination and the deeper levels of understanding that he, as a professional scientist, feels through his hard fought understanding of science without recognising that what he is eulogising is a philosophy of science, and without acknowledging that the recognition of the polemic as a valid form implies admission that debate is possible. To be fair he did recognise the difficulty of his own position with regard to absolutism and autocrasy, but that only made things worse and made his own status as ‘talking head’ less tennable.
I agreed with 95% of what he said in the body of the lecture, especially regarding shifting objectivity to consensus and the journalistic tendancy to see reporting the controversy as balance, but his bookends showed that his own understanding of what philosophy of science is and does is every bit as skewed as poor reporting of MMR or climate change.
No-one is an authority on anyone else’s views but their own and no-one should be forced into a certain viewpoint irrespective of factual correctness. Evidence is just evidence. Interpretation is carried out by humans with human flaws. If you take your own argument a step or two further Prof Cox you will see the tyranny of your logic and recognise that we must be allowed to make mistakes irrespective of the quality of communication available.
‘Gendering’ of scientific paradigms
December 28, 2010
Very quick thought that I don’t want to loose;
I’ve been working with Kuhnian interpretation of scientific paradigms and was wondering if there was anything inherently gender-oriented within those definitions. For example the causal/Newtonian paradigm is all sharp divisions, yes/no, few grey areas, little space for discussion. It feels stereotypically masculine. Whereas the probabilistic paradigm is all curves, no sharp divisions, few answers that are just black or white, very perspectival and multivocal. It feels slightly feminine, to me at least.
It is just a thought sketch and may just be me being all synaesthetic, but could it be that in the way we describe current science we may be imbuing it with a feminine pseudo-gender which is at odds with all previous science and contributes to the difficulty we have with getting to grips with probabilistic science in general.
I’ve not done the research but it seems to me that there should be plenty of work available on how the different genders deal with things like ‘risk’. Anyway just a thought.
Developing the argument about arguments
June 14, 2010
I’ve put forward the proposition that different Kuhnian scientific paradigms have associated with them different modes of argument (Newtonian-causal, Einsteinian-relativistic, Quantum/complex-probabilistic). This shouldn’t be a big surprise and is almost a definition for a paradigm shift in itself.
What I would like to suggest is that in order to perform an argument for or against a specific piece of science the rhetorical tools that you employ must be of at least the same level as the science itself. So you cannot employ causal arguments in a debate about the aerodynamics of Formula One racing cars and hope to win, but you could employ causal arguments of momentum transfer when discussing the science of playing snooker. Likewise the basic chemistry of cooking has no use for relativistic rhetoric, but the evaluation of emotional response only really has meaning in relative terms. You could not hope to argue successfully that a weather system will or will not respond to your building of a new house in simple black and white terms, but you may be successful if you provide a probability factor that you will induce a rain shadow on your new garden by raising the roof-line by a meter.
So if we take this thesis one step further we have a ready made quality of debate-o-meter. All we need to do is look at the paradigmic position of the arguers with respect to the subject matter of the argument to give a gross overview of whether one or other will be able to defend his position. Those who use the correct tools for the subject being more likely to win the argument because the opponent has not understood that in order to argue a scientific position you must first understand where that position fits in the schema of scientific paradigms.
At this point I should just state that we can definitely use a scale of increasing effectiveness (causal-relativistic-probabilistic) because scientific discovery is cumulative and even scientific dead ends like phlogiston taught scientific method by error.
So next time you read or have a real debate about a subject that has science at its heart look at the paradigm that your argument belongs to against the paradigm that the science belongs to.
Thats it. A simple one today.
Fit the argument to the paradigm and you will have more success.
and
Later paradigms are more likely to win than early paradigms.
However this has an potentially vast implication regarding scientific communication, the use of experts, the role of education in democracies, all sorts of things. We may get to those eventually.
