Science is the area of human research that is based on empirical observation and inductive reasoning.
Although I engage in a critique of science in what follows, in terms of human destruction of the environment through waste of all forms and manipulation of delicate ecosystems, we should always err on the side of nature's balance and, where appropriate, we should use our scientific understanding and power to rebalance and recreate the conditions that are so rapidly disappearing on Earth in terms of ecosytems in the water, atmosphere, and in various forms of forests.
Nature gave us the capacity to think and we should use it to preserve the beauty and habitat in which it is possible to think. Thinking that humans can lay waste to the Earth and then use technology to save it is ignorant of human shortcomings. But, also, thinking that technology could not save us, from, perhaps, an asteroid, is also ignorant.
We can replant forests, save species, and, at the same time, use computers to better understand how and where to do this. We can clean the oceans with a fleet of cleanly powered skimmers and do something with the plastic that is polluting the bottom of our food chain. We can clean the water supplies of their chemical waste using reverse osmosis and do something, again, with that waste.
If we can ever learn to harness clean energy that can bring things cheaply into space with slow elevators, we can send our waste into the sun and use the sun as a giant incinerator that would no more be affected by our garbage than a mountain's geological evolution would be by hindered by a fly.
Technology, or the manifestation of scientific understanding, should be used wisely and cautiously. Humans have largely avoided wisdom and caution so far and to expect that we will do so in the future would require a strict political structure in which science is restrained in time and unethical enterprises.
Exactly how science operates or progresses is a subject of much debate and is studied in the philosophy of science. A seminal work in this field, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, by Thomas Kuhn, points to the idea that science progresses only through resolution of anomalies that can not be adequately described with the existing scientific paradigm. The perturbation in the orbit of Mercury, for instance, was not accounted for within a Newtonian framework.
In the above, image, the expansionist model is the one largely held by scientists whereas the revolutionary model is understood by many philosophers of science. At what point does the expansion stop?
We can not know. Where do the revolutions stop on the rightmost, and, I think, correct model of scientific progression? Well, induction would tell us that it will never stop and skepticism tells us that no matter how long it stops we can never fully know unless we have a theory with no room for anomalies but what this would look like still remains vulnerable to the possibility that an anomaly will be observed.
Science is an institution and tends towards a resistance to new ideas that challenge established theory. Ego and reputation can hinder change toward improvement.
What I call sciligion is the tendency of scientists to have such blind faith in their ontological paradigm that all suggestions to the contrary are considered nonsense not because of the content of such suggestions but because it hurts the religious blind faith scientists have in their paradigms, forces, laws, things, and relations.
This is why a true paradigm shift in science is always seen, at first, as insanity and nonsense by the establishment. I would say that the higher a scientist rises, the greater his or her sciligious belief and stubborness becomes. This is in no way to claim that religion or unreasonable thinking has supremacy or any influence at all over science but only to point out the deep psychological flaws and the sentimentality of scientific belief when it hinders scientific progress.
We must remember that the vast majority of established scientists are not the ones who will make fundamental advances in our understanding of the world. Most established scientists will do important and advancing work within a particular paradigm and without their work there would be no anomalies to attempt to fit into theory.
It will always be a philosophically minded scientist (Einstein) that will make the changes. Remember, Einstein wrote at least as much philosophy as he did science, though people seem to largely ignore his work.
Perhaps he was a questionable philosopher but a greater philosopher-scientist. I would hope that more scientists will come to understand the philosophy of science, induction, and notions of force and causation at their most fundamental, conceptual level. Remember, Einstein failed half of his classes. How many in the scientific establishment have failed half of their classes?
Remember, Newton suffered from bouts of insanity and spent much of his time looking for biblical codes. Who, in the scientific establishment of today has such a free mind as to be able to see the possibility of mysticism without confusing it with objective science?
Remember, Watson and Crick were experimenting with LSD at the time of their double-helix conceptual revolution (and, they initially left out Rosalind Franklin, a critical female assistant from the laurels of their work.) Women can do anything, mentally, that any man can do and any belief to the contrary is, perhaps, a precise cause of why women have been left out of so much. Larry Summers is as wrong as one can be about this.
If there is a paradigm or a conceptual "box" to be in, then most scientists and especially the most prominent ones, have built careers in the box and are not even interested in being aware that it is reasonable to consider flaws in their box or that anything at all exists outside of it. Maybe some things in their box do not exist or could be revised in a way that is more elegant.
In 2010, there are various anomalies in science. The existence of Dark Matter or Dark Energy, the repellant force of gravity in supermasssive groups of the universe, and the lack of understanding between the quantum world and cosmological forces are all examples of areas science is currently attempting to understand. It may be that current theory is correct but needs more work or, it may be that the paradigm introduced by relativity theory, like Newtonian physics, is not adequate to describe all aspects of empirical reality.
Induction is more faith in stability or consistency than reason, and the possibility that something like the speed of light could have been or could be different somewhere or sometime else is largely overlooked as nonsense. While there is no reason to believe that the speed of light has ever been different, there is certainly no reason to believe that it has remained constant.
This is one of the most important points philosophers can make when studying science and, unfortunately, scientists often fail to realize the inherent flaws of induction. They look on suggestions that induction, itself, is weak, as nonsense because they simply do not understand the point David Hume made centuries ago about the problem of inductive reasoning being based on assumption or habit and nothing more.
As to creationists using the possibility that the speed of light could have been different as a refutation of carbon dating, there is a flaw in their logic.
Just because something is possible does not mean we have any reason to assume that it is true and, as such, I think that creationism is the apex of sciligious belief. It takes an epistemically unjustified source, ie. the bible, and holds it equivalent to our methods of observation. Idiocy is what it is and nothing more.
I do not discount the idea that there is intelligent life in the universe, however, and that, possibly, this intelligence may have seeded or manipulated evolution on Earth.
I do not think there is good evidence, at the moment, for such manipulation but there may be some evidence that life came here from elsewhere in its most elementary forms. None of this would solve the initial problem of the origin of extra-terrestrial life.
Spontanous terrestrial evolution must have happened somewhere sometime, unless the truth is much different from this primitive understanding. Perhaps existence is a willing and this becoming can not be tested, so such conjecture is almost religious but is one imaginable possibility.
Perhaps there is no such thing as "random" in nature and our understanding of "random" selection must be rethought. Perhaps "random enough" is sufficient when it comes to genetic mutations. |
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Because a particular ontological model has gained useful popularity in science does not mean that it is the best possible model. There may very well be a better way to think of an atom than the popular solar-system-like model or the orbital shells models where there is a nucleus and various orbits. Multiple, complementary ontological models are often useful and increase the conceptual diversity related to an object of scientific scrutiny.
More emphasis should be placed on the limitations of science in scientific education so that new scientists are more capable of solving potentially paradigmatic problems. Once someone spends many years studying a rigid ontological structure with little to no room for the questioning of fudamental principles, their ability to think outside such an ontology is greatly diminished if not completely extinguished.
An astronomy professor once told me, in the year 2000, that he thought that there would be no further fundamental revolutions in science. I am quite certain that this is what academic scientists in the west believed throughout the Aristotelian paradigm and the Newtonian paradigm. I see no reason that the Einsteinian paradigm should not also be, in some way, flawed.
If it is not completely descriptive of all empirical reality and there are anomalies, then there is always a possibility that the paradigm is capable of being undermined by a more elegant or powerful theory. And, there are anomalies in cosmological understandings of force so, it is obvious that Einstein was wrong to some degree or else the anomalies would not exist.
This is not to say that any scientific theory must capture the phenomenal nature of consciousness to be complete, as some philosophers have contended. Consciousness can not be studied scientifically because consciousness is private. Surely, we can map conscious reports to neural patterns and perhaps we can have a complete corresponding functional-consciousness description. But, no such map or objective description can capture subjective experience. I do not see this as a flaw in science but a principled feature of reality.
String theory can not truly be a scientific theory if it is not testable. If it is incapable of being tested but it works well, then it is more akin to philsophy than any science. Perhaps infinite theories could provide some ontological usefulness but are not testable. These theories are not scientific but they are no less interesting because of it. Logic and Mathematics are not science but they have proven indispensible for scientific and a priori understanding.
Cosmological Conjecture 1: I do not think that there is reason to believe that there was a big bang given that we now know that a repellant property exists in the universe that would account for the red shift we observe without ever having a necessary origin.
Perhaps the existence of the background radiation negates this conjecture, but alternative understandings of the radiation may tie into the current anomalous aspects found in cosmological observation. If science has always been fundamentally revolutionized in the past, the induction, the very foundational method in science, would dictate that the future possibly, and even always probably, will hold revolutions in our empirical understanding of this particular reality we find ourselves in.
Cosmological Conjecture 2 (CSTAG Conjecture [Curved Space-Time Accounts for Gravity] described in detail here): I do not think gravity should be considered a force but only a misunderstanding of the curvature of space in the presence of various quantites of mass. Curving inward towards relatively small masses and outward in the absence of mass, or, in the space between galactic clusters.
In cases where mass or the absence of mass have reached certain thresholds, it does, perhaps, curve outward and create the repellant red-shift we observe. This could account for the accelleration of the red-shift. Gravity is like the ether, it is an unecessarily posited thing. Mass tends toward itself because space is so curved near relatively small masses (planets, galaxies) not because gravitons or gravitational waves exist.
Gravity is like an unnecessary middle manager who, without, things would be more elegant and simple. Space curves around mass but it is not forced to curve it just does because, I posit, the way matter affects matter and the way space is affected by matter may very well be distinct. I have more to say about this theory on my space page.
