topics: |  science | philosophy | essays | dup

What is science? The word is usually used to mean one of three things, or a
mixture of them. I do not think we need to be precise--it is not always a
good idea to be too precise. Science means, sometimes, a special method of
finding things out. Sometimes it means the body of knowledge arising from the
things found out. It may also mean the new things you can do when you have
found something out, or the actual doing of new things. This last field is
usually called technology--but if you look at the science section in Time
magazine you will find it covers about 50 percent what new things are found
out and about 50 percent what new things can be and are being done. And so
the popular definition of science is partly technology, too. 

1 Uses of science

(Technology): whether to use it for good or for evil. We like
improved production, but we have problems with automation. We are happy with
the development of medicine, ... but we have hidden laboratories in which men
are working as hard as they can to develop bacteria for which no one else
will be able to find a cure.

At Buddhist temple in Hawaii, a man told F: "I am going to tell you something
that you will never forget." And then he said, 
"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens
the gates of hell."  

And so it is with science. 

Content of Science

the ancients believed that the earth was the back of an elephant that stood
on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea. Of course, what held up the sea
was another question. They did not know the answer. 

The belief of the ancients was the result of imagination. It was a poetic and
beautiful idea. Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea? The
world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some of
them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We whirl
around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting. And what holds us? The
force of gravitation, which is not only a thing of the earth but is the thing
that makes the earth round in the first place, holds the sun together and
keeps us running around the sun in our perpetual attempt to stay away. This
gravity holds its sway not only on the stars but between the stars; it holds
them in the great galaxies for miles and miles in all directions.

This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge
as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless sea of the other idea--just as
mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic
pictures that came before.  

But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the
imagination of man. No one who did not have some inkling of this through
observations could ever have imagined such a marvel as nature is. 

Evolution: First, there was the earth without anything alive on it. For
billions of years this ball was spinning with its sunsets and its waves and
the sea and the noises, and there was no thing alive to appreciate it. Can
you conceive, can you appreciate or fit into your ideas what can be the
meaning of a world without a living thing on it? We are so used to looking at
the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand
what it means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing
alive on it. And in most places in the universe today there probably is
nothing alive.

Or life itself. The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts,
is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with
all other life. There is a part of chlorophyll, an important chemical in the
oxygen processes in plants, that has a kind of square pattern; it is a rather
pretty ring called a benzine ring. And far removed from the plants are
animals like ourselves, and in our oxygen-containing systems, in the blood,
the hemoglobin, there are the same interesting and peculiar square
rings. There is iron in the center of them instead of magnesium, so they are
not green but red, but they are the same rings. 

The proteins of bacteria and the proteins of humans are the same. In fact it
has recently been found that the protein-making machinery in the bacteria can
be given orders from material from the red cells to produce red cell
proteins. So close is life to life. 

2 Appreciating science

Yet science is still not thoroughly appreciated.

Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle, a set of six Christmas lectures for
children. The point of Faraday's lectures was that 
no matter what you look at, if you look at it closely enough, you are
involved in the entire universe. And so he got, by looking at every feature
of the candle, into combustion, chemistry, etc. 

The intro describes Faraday's life...  results on electrolysis ... 
that the principles he discovered are used today in chrome plating and the
anodic coloring of aluminum, as well as in dozens of other industrial
applications. 

I do not like that statement. Here is what Faraday said about his own
discovery: "The atoms of matter are in some ways endowed or associated with
electrical powers, to which they owe their most striking qualities, amongst
them their mutual chemical affinity."  ... most exciting was that this was
one of the most dramatic moments in the history of science, one of those rare
moments when two great fields come together and are unified. He suddenly
found that two apparently different things were different aspects of the same
thing. Electricity was being studied, and chemistry was being
studied. Suddenly they were two aspects of the same thing--chemical changes
with the results of electrical forces.  And they are still understood that
way. So to say merely that the principles are used in chrome plating is
inexcusable.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of
human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of
logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting
what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are
examples of this. 

3 Finding things out: What can be asked in science

... the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or
not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood
directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge
of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in
the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, "The
exception proves that the rule is wrong."  That is the principle of science.
If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation,
that rule is wrong.

The principle that observation is the judge [limits] the kind of questions
that can be answered - to questions like: "if I do this, what will happen?"
There are ways to try it and see. 

Questions like, "should I do this?" and
"what is the value of this?" are not of [this type].

But if a thing is not scientific, if it cannot be subjected to the test of
observation, this does not mean that it is dead, or wrong, or stupid.

Scientists take all those things that can be analyzed by observation, and
thus the things called science are found out. But there are some things left
out, for which the method does not work. This does not mean that those things
are unimportant. They are, in fact, in many ways the most important. In any
decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is
always a "should" involved, and this cannot be worked out from "if I do this,
what will happen?" alone. You say, "Sure, you see what will happen, and then
you decide whether you want it to happen or not." But that is the step the
scientist cannot take. You can figure out what is going to happen, but then
you have to decide whether you like it that way or not. 

"Scientific" = "thorough" : Metaphorical extension

technical consequences that follow from the principle of observation as
judge: e.g. observation cannot be rough. You have to be very careful.  piece
of dirt in the apparatus that made the color change; check observations very
carefully...

It is interesting that this thoroughness, which is a virtue, is often
misunderstood. When someone says a thing has been done scientifically, often
all he means is that it has been done thoroughly. I have heard people talk of
the "scientific" extermination of the Jews in Germany. There was nothing
scientific about it. It was only thorough. There was no question of making
observations and then checking them in order to determine something. In that
sense, there were "scientific" exterminations of people in Roman times and in
other periods... 

the game of making observations...  a famous joke about a man who complains
to a friend of a mysterious phenomenon. The white horses on his farm eat more
than the black horses. He worries about this and cannot understand it, until
his friend suggests that maybe he has more white horses than black ones.

Objectivity

Another important characteristic of science is its objectivity. ... you, the
experimenter, might like one result better than another. because of
irregularities, like pieces of dirt falling in, the result varies from time
to time. You do not have everything under control. You like the result to be
a certain way, so the times it comes out that way, you say, "See, it comes
out this particular way."

There could be a certain amount of sense, for example, in the way you analyze
the question of whether stocks went up or down because of what the President
said or did not say. 

... the more specific the rule, the more powerful it is, the more liable it is
to exceptions, and the more interesting and valuable it is to check. 

Words can be meaningless. If no sharp conclusions can be drawn, ... then the
proposition they state is almost meaningless...

Imagination and science

imagination in science... is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike
that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something
that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has
already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of;
furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed
difficult.

Sciences need to be free

I don't think of the problem as between socialism and capitalism but rather
between suppression of ideas and free ideas.  The fact that Russia is not
free is clear to everyone, and the consequences in the sciences are quite
obvious. ... Russia [is] doing nothing.
   [quite perspicacious in post-Sputnik 1963, when many American academics
   still imagined that science could flourish under the totalitarian regimes
   of China and the Soviet Union. ]

---
series of 3 lectures at U. Washington in Apr 1963, remained unpublished
during Richard Feynman's lifetime... the Nobel-winning physicist thinks
aloud on several "meta"--questions of science. What is the nature of the
tension between science and religious faith? Why does uncertainty play such
a crucial role in the scientific imagination? Is this really a scientific
age? Marked by Feynman's characteristic combination of rationality and
humor, these lectures provide an intimate glimpse at the man behind the
legend. "In case you are beginning to believe," he says at the start of his
final lecture, "that some of the things I said before are true because I am
a scientist and according to the brochure that you get I won some awards
and so forth, instead of your looking at the ideas themselves and judging
them directly...I will get rid of that tonight. I dedicate this lecture to
showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man as
myself can make." Rare, perhaps. Irreverent, sure. But ridiculous? Not even
close.