Science: It's Not What It's Cracked Up To Be part 2

Science doesn't really exist.  Scientific beliefs are either proved wrong, or else they quickly become engineering.  Everything else is untested speculation. — James P. Hogan

Since I wrote the first part of this series I went back and reread "Kicking the Sacred Cows."  I figured since it seemed to be such an influential book I should maybe reread it.  I was surprised at what was in it.  Mostly I was surprised at what was not in it.  It turns out that in my researches on the internet a lot of what I learned was beyond what Mr. Hogan was talking about and pointed me towards.  However, he did say a lot of good things.  I particularly like the quote above which is what he starts his book out with, right at the beginning of the introduction.

In my listening to the lectures on the Philosophy of Science I learned something that is amazing.  Science is founded on a logical fallacy.  At one time scientists, or natural philosophers as they were then known, knew this and worried about it.  Today scientists don't seem worried about it at all, just the Philosophers of Science, and I'm pretty sure that most of the rest of us don't know anything about it.  The fallacy is called Affirming the Consequent, or sometimes Affirming the Ascendant.

It goes like this, A therefore B, does not necessarily lead to B therefore A. Mr. Hogan gives the best example of this I think.  If the sprinklers turn on the grass will be wet.  Ok the sprinklers turn on and the grass is wet, that's true.  Say the next morning you wake up and go outside and find that the grass is wet, does that mean the sprinklers turned on?  No it doesn't.  Maybe it rained, or maybe there was a hard dew last night, or maybe a UFO passed by and emptied it's cooling tanks on your lawn.  See that last part is where Mr. Hogan's science fiction writing comes in and why I thinks his example is so great.  Much better, I think that the wikipedia version which can be found HERE.

How does that apply to science.  Well as I said it's foundational, but let me explain something first.  There are two ways that we can come to knowledge.  One is called deductive reasoning, and it is full proof and gives an excellent example from the history of philosophy.  A standard example is

All ravens are black. P1
That is a raven P2
Therefore is is black. D1

As long as the premises are true the deduction is true.  The history part is they used to say "All swans are white," but when Australia was discovered they found black swans and therefore the first premise was not true anymore.  They've never, so far, found a raven that was not black.  The problem with deductive reasoning is that it's not predictive so your limited in what you can learn.

The second kind of reasoning is inductive reasoning and it is where you reason from specific facts to general facts.  It's power is that it's predictive.  It goes like this

The sun has always risen in the morning.
Therefore it will rise tomorrow, and every morning after.

Bertrand Russel who was a very smart man and wrote "Principia Mathmatica", liked to show that this type of reasoning is flawed and to show it he talked about a hen who reasoned, every morning the farmer brings me food, and went out to meet the farmer every morning for breakfast, until the farmer one morning cut her head off so that he could eat her for dinner.

However, while inductive reasoning is flawed, it's power is that it's predictive and allows us to do things in life and so we depend on it.  So what does this mean?  It means that we depend on the logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent to do science.  Lets go back to Mr. Hogans example

If the sprinklers turn on P1
The grass will be wet D1

In science we call P1 the hypothesis.  So we give it a fancy name and then forget about it.  The problem is that as a society we give science such a high level of credence, that we don't always question what they are saying when we should be questioning them a lot more.  Karl Popper a famous philosopher of science saw this problem and said that a statement can only be meaningful if it can be falsified.  The above statement could be falsified.  I could cover the grass with a tarp and turn on the sprinklers then the grass wouldn't get wet.  The scientist would then go back and either discard the hypothesis or alter it to fit the then known facts.

Now I think what the problem is really is that we, who live in the first world, live in a world that is a world of engineering marvels, and we falsely attribute it to science.  I'm not saying that science is not part of engineering I'm just saying that we can't see science, but we can see engineering.  Let me give a perfect example.

At the turn of the century, most "scientists" were saying that it was impossible for man to achieve heavier that air flight, or powered flight.  Why?  Because up till then all attempts at it had failed and they were explaining why.  The a couple of bike mechanics ignored the scientists, the Wright Brothers, and built an airplane.  Then the scientist got involved and started to improve on the Wright Brothers invention and in less that 70 years we went from powered flight is impossible, to putting a man on the moon.  And that is pretty much how science works.  However the scientists had to discard their hypothesis.

As I was thinking about this topic I was wondering if engineering, or technology, is still driving science.  Now we have big science, which I think is a problem, and I wasn't sure.  Then I serendiptiously read the December 2013 issue of the Smithsonian magazine.  It was the issue where they were talking about the people they gave their innovation awards to.  One of them was Professor John Rogers.  For his PhD research he was doing research that could determine the properties of thin films by subjecting them to laser pulses.  Before he was out of school chip manufacturers were interested in the research.  The way they were then measuring the ultra thin layers of a microchips was by tapping them, which was not only slow but risked corrupting the chips.  The laser system would be much better.  Dr. Rogers and a classmate recruited students from the management school and came up with 100 page business proposal.

They were giving a presentation to an executive from Tencor and were showing many, many screens of equations and theories telling how the could determine the properties of the thin films stiffness, delamination, longitudinal sound velocity, thermal transfer etc.  Finally the executive said I don't care about any of that can you tell me how thick the film is?  Rogers said yes they could but it was something they hadn't even put in the business plan, because as a scientist it was probably the least interesting thing about thin films.

Matthew Banet, who was the friend who co-founded the startup said: "It was a seminal moment in all of our lives.  We went back with our tails between our legs."  They went back and worked on their equipment until it could measure variations in thin films as small as on tenth of an angstrom.  Dr. Rogers said that "sometimes the technology push drives scientific understanding, rather than the other way around."  He also said that Tencor's requirements forced them "to understand a lot more about the optics and physics and acoustic and signal processing.  It put all scientific research into the context of something that could have value beyond publication in a scientific journal."

The startup, Active Impulse Systems raised $3 million in venture capital funding in 1995.  They produced their first unit, the InSite300, in 1997, and sold the compony in August 1998 for $29 million.

That's how it works.  Science turns into engineering that we can see and makes the world a better place.  Science that never turns into engineering is just guessing.  That's all it is.  Here is something that I also learned in the lecture series.  Every thing that science believed was true at the beginning of the 20th century turned out to be wrong by the end.  Why should be believe that it will be any different at the end of the 21st Century?