quote:Einstein's novel description, in his theory of general relativity, of gravitation as a consequence, not of the attraction between bodies according to their mass, but of the curvature of space-time generated by matter and energy, was enshrined in text books within a few years of its formulation.
Steven Weinberg describes how, from 1919 onwards, various expeditions by astronomers set out to test the theory by measuring the deflection of starlight by the sun during an eclipse. Not until the availability of radio telescopy in the early Fifties were the measurements accurate enough to provide verification.
For 40 years, despite a paucity of evidence, the theory was generally accepted because, in Weinberg's phrase, it was "compellingly beautiful".
Much has been written about the imagination in science, of wild hunches born out, of sudden intuitive connections, and benign promptings from mundane events (let no one forget the structure of benzene and Kekulé's dream of a snake eating its tail) and of the occasional triumph of beauty over truth.
In James Watson's account, when Rosalind Franklin stood before the final model of the DNA molecule, she "accepted the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true".
Nevertheless, the idea still holds firm among us laypeople that scientists do not believe what they cannot prove. At the very least, we demand of them higher standards of evidence than we expect from literary critics, journalists or priests.
Despite being a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, empiricist and materialist, I am a strong believer in our need to allow mental processes not consciously accessible to play around with the information in our heads and make connections that the conscious tools of logic and experimentation would not normally draw. As the various memes bounce around in our subconscious and in our dreams, patterns emerge that hold deep truths, and I worry sometimes that those of us dedicated to science and skepticism dismiss those truths as not falsifiable or objective enough.
What do you think?
At the end of the article were some quotes that I just loved, so I'm including them. There are more on the Edge website.
quote:Great minds can sometimes guess the truth, before they have marshalled the evidence or the arguments, using what Diderot called the "esprit de divination".
John Brockman asked scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
Randolph Nesse, University of Michigan: "I'm pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. Those who are occasionally consumed by false beliefs do better in life than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act."
Stanislas Dehaene, Institut National de la Santé, Paris: "We vastly underestimate the differences that set the human brain apart from the brains of other primates.''
Carlo Rovelli, Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille: "Time does not exist."
Seth Lloyd, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "I believe in science. Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would refuse to believe in them."
Daniel Hillis, chairman, Applied Minds Inc: "I know that it sounds corny, but I believe that people are getting better. In other words, I believe in moral progress."
Craig Venter, president, J Craig Venter Science Foundation: "Life is ubiquitous in the universe."
Janna Levin, Columbia University: "I believe that there is an external reality, and you are not all figments of my imagination."
quote:I am a strong believer in our need to allow mental processes not consciously accessible to play around with the information in our heads and make connections that the conscious tools of logic and experimentation would not normally draw.
I agree. I'll even take it a step further - I trust human judgement (including the above mental processes) more than pure reasoning because it is so easy to make a slight error in logic that makes something that sounds wrong seem to be proven right. In those situations I tend to believe my intuitive judgement, until logic can convince my mental processes to sing a different tune.
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posted
Here's something I posted on another thread that didn't seem to elict any responses:
quote:Karl, There's no purely scientific reason to believe that a soul exists. It isn't objectively detectable. It may be subjectively detectable, but given the tremendous unreliability inherent in subjective assessment I wouldn't go trusting to that either.
From my perspective, the existence of a soul is not the point. If the soul was undetectable and had no effect on reality, I would see no reason to give it a thought. Rather, it's the different views of the world offered by considering it to exist of not. As I've said, I don't believe that free will nor true creativity could exist without something akin to the soul. The effects of this postulated soul are what I'm concerned about. I choose to believe (or, if there is no free will, am compelled by my past reinforment/punishment contingencies) in a view of the world that includes these things. (You could say I have faith in the soul.)
Science is a wonderful tool that doesn't deserve the ignorant mangling that starLisa and Tres have been subjecting it to here. But people often fail to understand it's purpose. Science does not give us truth; it's not trying to encompass reality. All it really does, when you get down to it, is give us a method for testing how much confidence we should put in projective hypotheses (i.e ones that take the form of if you do X in situation Y, Z will be the result). Once you're there, you've reached the end of what science alone can tell you. Even so called sceintific theories are not actually a part of science. Rather, they are philosophical ideas that have received support from scientific testing.
I'm a student of personality psychology. Science is a very powerful part of this field, but restricting psychology to just science would neuter it. Science is used to set bounds by saying "This is what happens." or, more importantly, "This does not happen.", but it is the job of the theorist to, while respecting these bounds, go far beyond them in creating theories (or, as I like to think of them, mythologies) about the psyche. The scientifically testible aspects of these theores are used to drive future research questions. They also serve another purpose in that, like all functional mythologies, they present stories that are used to look at and parse the gray areas of the world that are not currently and possibly will never be nailed down by scientific analysis.
There are tons of different ways to choose what mythologies you want to believe in, among them the implications of that mythology, but the things is that this is a choice. There is nothing impelling you towards one over another as is the case in the face of scientifically tested stuff.
I choose to believe in the soul. Some people choose to believe in athiesm. Others choose religion. Some people believe in the ID mythology. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these choices (assuming that the ID is that ID exists and not that it is science).
As people are not perfect, these choices are rarely purely in the realm of the undetermined grays areas which are either outside of science's scope or at least current reach. Nor do they generally restrict what they try to do or justify based on these mythologies to these gray areas. To me, this whole stupid ID issue is because of this. But, to me, despite these imperfection, it is important to acknowledge the fundamental role that accepting undeterminable mythologies plays in human existence.
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Yeah, that's got to be much longer than people were expecting or are going to read.
posted
I think the "too beautiful to be false" thing is okay, but I much prefer the method of multiple working hypotheses as the default way to deal with unknowns. The reason being that I believe we generate more and better tests (experiments and/or controlled observations) of theories when we are contrasting them with other apparently viable alternative explanations.
The caveat on my caveat is that I do think that we can reach a point where considering some alternatives is counter-productive. Dispensing with the strong version of a theory by experimentation (the strong version of a theory is the one that says "X is true" or "X will be observed under the following conditions") should be sufficient to allow us to discontinue consideration of some hypotheses.
If not, then science is doomed to always accept every theory provisionally.
Getting back to David's first point, I do believe in the successful guesses of the "prepared mind." This leads me to put more faith in the intuition of people with specific knowledge in the area in question than in the (usually more vague) prognostications of outsiders and laymen.
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quote:Despite being a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, empiricist and materialist, I am a strong believer in our need to allow mental processes not consciously accessible to play around with the information in our heads and make connections that the conscious tools of logic and experimentation would not normally draw. As the various memes bounce around in our subconscious and in our dreams, patterns emerge that hold deep truths, and I worry sometimes that those of us dedicated to science and skepticism dismiss those truths as not falsifiable or objective enough.
I think you might be confusing the way scientific discoveries end up happening with what justifies those discoveries. If Albert has a dream that gives him a hint about the next revolution in physics, that's perfectly fine... so long as the theory he finally comes up with can be justified as the best, simplest explanation of our experimental results. This might not be the reason he thought it up -- that's a question for his psychologist -- but it is the reason for its being our best theory.
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posted
Likewise, if a lightning bolt inscribed an equation on some pavement, and we looked at the equation and realized it was an awesome theory, that would be good science as well. What matters isn't how the ideas come about, but why they're good ideas.
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Yeah, but only a very few of the theory's predictions could be confirmed at the time that Einstein first proposed relativity.
It explained a small number of non-Newtonian phenomena and predicted a few things that were readily tested.
Still, the theory had appeal. More importantly, it has withstood the test of time and furhter observation and experimentation.
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The description of why it was adopted is a bit misleading. Newtonian gravitation was already known to be incorrect; General Relativity agreed with preexisting measurements that Newtonian gravitation also agreed with; General Relativity could be shown to be a way of resolving the conflicts between the (already heavily supported by evidence) theory of Special Relativity and Newtonian gravitation (though Newtonian gravitation takes quit a beating in the resolution).
It wasn't just that it was pretty, its that it was a pretty explanation of considerable evidence. This is scientific. It wasn't even a choice between GR and some other candidate theory: the other candidate theory, Newtonian gravitation, had been shown incorrect. Being both the only theory not known to be incorrect and a very elegant theory in agreement with a large body of evidence, GR was swiftly adopted.
Now, there were considerable implications of GR that were untested, but that's in a way the whole point of a theory -- to come up with a new explanation for things that already work, which can be tested by exploring if other things previously not looked at also work the way the theory says they should.
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Destineer, give me more credit than that. I am talking about the inspiration itself, not the subsequent confirming or debunking (which, as Bob has reiterated about general relativity, can often take quite a long time while the theory is generally "accepted" due to its parsimony and its adding to existing scientific knowledge).
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quote:If not, then science is doomed to always accept every theory provisionally.
Do we want science to claim any more than that? My belief is that science should claim its theories are only as certain as they can rationally be shown to be certain, and no further.
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Is there such a thing as a perfect theory, one that is objectively true? Do you believe there are mythologies that are more true than others?
And, separate from the existance question, does your assertion that they are the indeterminables of life mean that, even if some are true and others not, we as humans can not know (logically) which is which? And, to tie it back into the thread theme, is there utility in inspiration or some other non-logical thought process, that can determine the truthfullness of the (logical) indeterminables.
Or am I totally misreading your post? These are just the thoughts I had while looking through it.
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quote:If not, then science is doomed to always accept every theory provisionally.
Do we want science to claim any more than that? My belief is that science should claim its theories are only as certain as they can rationally be shown to be certain, and no further.
Your statement has nothing to do with accepting every theory provisionally.
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Your statement has nothing to do with accepting every theory provisionally.
I'll be more specific. I believe that because science cannot rationally show any theory is more than provisionally accurate, it shouldn't claim its theories should be accepted more than provisionally. And I don't think it would need to do more than that, for any significant practical purpose.
quote:You sure you don't want to redefine the meaning of the word wrong, Tres?
Well, I think I've already established that wrong means "disagreeing with me." It does have to make you wonder, though, how I was disagreeing with myself... Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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