Let's Clear Up a Few Things About Science
Welcome to another Still in the Storm Substack post.
Today, I want to clear up a few things about science.
Many of you are probably aware of what I’m about to say, but I think repetition is good.
After all, we do not have the leisure of resting on our laurels for even one second.
Without further adieu, let’s dig in.
Science cannot be settled
It is never, ever settled and truly can’t be by its very nature.
If anyone tries to tell you that, they don’t know what they are talking about.
An understanding of scientific knowledge sheds light on this.
Generally speaking, knowledge comes in two flavors, a priori and a posteriori.
A priori knowledge is derived from reason alone so, we can know that it is true.
It comprises things like mathematics and is unchanging.
Contrary to popular belief these days 2 + 2 will always equal 4.
That said, a posteriori knowledge is unknowable by reason alone.
It requires observation and empirical evidence, such as from an experiment.
Therefore, this type of knowledge is conditional and can change.
By definition, science cannot be settled.
Hopefully, that settles this debate (pun intended).
Do not elevate science to religious dogma
Moving on, science should never be elevated to a position that is higher than that which it can provide.
We should never, ever put our trust or faith in science.
It’s not, nor should it ever have become, religious dogma.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened as we have turned science into what is known as scientism.
Scientism is where science is the only allowable source of knowledge of our reality and everything else, like philosophy and theology, is sidelined.
I don’t think I need to tell you just how incredibly dangerous this can be.
In fact, someone greater than myself has captured it even better than perhaps I can.
C.S. Lewis nailed it
I think that C.S. Lewis perhaps best captured the potential threat of science as scientism.
Just check out the quotes below and decide for yourself.
“I dread government in the name of science. That’s how tyrannies come in.”
“The new oligarchy must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists till in the end the politicians become merely the scientists’ puppets.”
Sounds, awfully familiar, no?
It seems we have a thing or two that we still need to learn.
We must learn from Covid
Covid showed us how science could be wielded as a weapon for the control and herding of the populace.
This can never be allowed to happen again.
Thus, we must reclaim true science that is free from politics and religion.
It is imperative that we hold science accountable and do not overly rely upon it.
This is not to say that it’s all wrong and we should just scrap it all either.
We need to rein it so that it can no longer be used against us.
Oh yeah, and it’s absolutely not anti-science to question science.
In fact, that’s the very foundation of true science so, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Moving forward, we all (yes, scientists and non-scientists) need to work together to keep science in check.
Are you up to the task?
Let me know what you think in the discussion below.
Talk soon,
Mike
P.S. I would love your feedback. Are you interested in a course on learning to understand science?
This would be something that teaches you a process that you can use to discern and evaluate the findings in any scientific study and much more.
Let me know by hitting 'reply' and sending a response. You can also email me directly at: mike@sciencedefined.com. I will read and respond to every email.
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Science is another name for questions and genuine inquiry
However if left in other hands and not our own, we default to other’s knowledge
Just like politics, everyone must re-engage with science
Science is our responsibility
So much settled science is NOT - instead it’s sitting upon unquestioned assumptions and peer protected theories
Indoctrinated in our schooled daze
Put your science on, pull at the foundational threads and find the established frauds
It’s time science came back to the kitchen table
For instance
Water is not H2O
This fundamental change in knowing has retarded science and medicine
Just need to think
How does two dry gases produce a liquid that puts out a fire that both the gases would fan. Suggest reading 100 reasons water is not H2O by Peter Peterson on smashwords. Free eBook.
Water is key to understand where we live, what we breathe, how we thrive.
I’ve written an article
We breathe air not oxygen
And I explain the origin of oxygen toxicity.
Oxygen is prescribed primarily for the terminally ill not for breathlessness
Palliative care is not kind
Air is measured by its moisture or humidity
Oxygen is measured by it dryness Eg medical oxygen has 67ppm of water contamination
Lung alveoli requires air to reach 100% humidity
Can you see the mismatch?
Oxygen has been used to cull in plain sight.
Premi babies are especially vulnerable to the dryness of oxygen- when exposed in 100% oxygen tents their eyes dried up -blinded
Our lungs are a wet system
Blood is a wet system
Hydration is blood’s function
Nothing to do with dry gases
We need common sense and common science to return to everyone with an interest in life improvement
Knowledge lost will be recovered once folk see that deceptions need to be ferreted out.
Excellent post - and it's always important to remind ourselves about what science is - and what it isn't.
Let's get a couple of minor quibbles out of the way first.
No, 2 + 2 does not always equal 4. If you're working with addition modulo 3, for example, then 2 + 2 = 1. However, (and this is a very important however), 2 + 2 **always** equals 4 when we're talking about this plus symbol + meaning 'standard' addition (with 2 and 4 and = having the usual meanings). Just as it **always** equals 1 when we're talking about this plus symbol meaning addition modulo 3. Once you've specified the meanings of **each** symbol and operation there's no room for manoeuvre.
The issue with the 'woke' drivel when it comes to maths is that they imply there's a kind of subjectivity - when there's none at all.
Secondly, I would suggest that science IS the only way of knowing about our physical world - which as, you rightly point out, does not mean that things like poetry, spirituality, philosophy etc are worthless. Our lives are much more than the sum of all the physical interactions going on between the atoms and molecules that make us up.
There's no such thing as an "indigenous" way of knowing about the properties of an electron, for example. There's no philosophical structure that will change the amount of charge it has, or the force it exerts on another electron.
Although I have more or less retired these days, my previous career was as a theoretical physicist, and it's from within physics we get the oft-quoted "examples" of things like Newton vs relativity, or Newton vs Quantum Mechanics etc. In my view it is incorrect to suggest that Newton (the old 'classical' picture) got it wrong. What we actually see is more of a refinement - how the old classical view sits within a much larger framework.
In some respects science CAN be settled - but it's in a negative, rather than positive, sense. We know, for example, that the Galilean transformation is not fully correct (it's a good approximation when dealing with the mechanics of objects travelling much slower than light). We know this because it can predict the wrong results for experiments. There's never going to be a time, from now on, where the Galilean transformation becomes the correct one (in all cases) - because it just doesn't predict the right results. The science IS 'settled' on that score.
Similarly in quantum mechanics, we have Bell's result which tells us that NO locally realistic theory of physics can reproduce all of the results of quantum mechanics. So if there's an experiment we can do which verifies this quantum result (and there are such experiments) we can say with certainty that the results of these experiments CANNOT be explained by a locally realistic theory. Once again, the science is settled on that.
Science, or rather the scientific method, is all about one very simple idea : if your theory doesn't work, change the theory
Most of the time we're not faced with this - most experiments are not 'falsification' experiments where the very tenets of current scientific thinking are being challenged. They tend to be things like "the theory predicts that this new antenna design will work better than the old one - let's build it and see". Sometimes, very rarely, in the course of that kind of experiment you're going to throw up an interesting result that can't be explained - and then you have to go back to the theory and see if it needs tinkering with. Usually it will be a case that there's some variable or effect you've neglected.
It's exceedingly rare that we're faced with a situation where everything has to be fundamentally re-written (or shown to be part of a larger theory like classical theories were shown to be part of larger theories like relativity or quantum mechanics).
Physics, however, is something of a special case. There's a limited set of laws whose consequences can be properly worked out, at least in principle. This convenient 'simplicity' does not carry over to things like biology or medical science - the systems one is dealing with there are hugely, hugely, more complex than those we typically examine in physics. We might use a bit of physics to understand how some protein folds, for example, but this protein in the body sits within an extraordinarily complex system full of all sorts of interactions and feedback mechanisms.
We don't even properly know what consciousness is, for example, but doctors are utterly convinced (or project that confidence) that some specific drug will be good for us - and yet at the same time recognise that there's a relationship between our state of mind (which we do not understand) and our health. It's one thing to be certain about the charge on an electron - quite another to be certain about the effects of a particular drug or vaccine.
It's always good to question - even the basics - because that process IS science; it's implicit in the scientific method. Theories (ideas) are challenged by the 'questions' posed by experiments. In broad terms, Popper's way of viewing this is the right one, I think. We can reject bad ideas (by experiment) - so we can 'settle' on that rejection, but we can never say that the ideas which pass an experimental test are "correct". Merely that they have, so far, passed all the experimental tests they've been subjected to.