"What is Modern Science? - Ask Sir Isaac Newton and Hercule Poirot!" - © Copyright Andrew Haynes (andychains.com)

Consider this: A pawn on a chessboard becomes self-aware. He "wakes up" and is aware of himself and his surroundings. He finds himself subject to forces he does not understand. He sees pieces of all sorts moving in apparently irregular and unpredictable ways. He finds himself in a fearful world of complete bewilderment. But he tries to start making sense of it. He wastes a lot of time initially because he just does not know how to proceed. But then he stumbles upon a very simple idea - he would make very careful observations and form theories based on the observations, without allowing any arbitrary and unverifiable presuppositions to influence his theories. Sticking to this systematic approach, over time he finds that things are not quite as crazy as they appeared. He finds that the various pieces move according to consistent rules. He formulates a grand theory - "the rules of the game".

This is not so far removed from human experience. There was no such thing as modern science for most of the 1000s of years of recorded human history. Modern science, as we understand it, has only existed for the last few hundred years - founded by the greats such as Sir Isaac Newton. It is from their beginnings that modern science has developed - and, for that matter, modern technologies (the "appliance of science").

The basic scientific approach is really quite simple, just as indicated by the above pawn - namely a combination of careful accumulation of data, with theories based upon such data.

NOTES:

1 -We want science to be objective - but we cannot get round the fact that we are all individuals and see the world though our own eyes, and process the world inside our own minds. However, to make things as objective as possible, in science everything is made as public as possible - data and theories have to be publicly accessible and assessable (though in practice the "public" may be specialists in a given topic)

2 - Data and theories are distinct from each other - data enters your mind via your senses, whereas theories are what you develop inside your mind - so data is observations, whereas theories are inventions

3 - To be legitimate, a theory has to be consistent with known facts - but that does not mean a theory is true, not least of all because other theories based on the very same data may be possible

4 - While a theory is based on facts (= data/observations), it is not itself a known fact (i.e. a direct observation)

A theory doesn’t necessarily come out of careful consideration of data - it may start as speculation, a wild guess, a hunch, a dream, a moment of inspiration - but, however a theory arises it must then be assessed in terms of relevant observations.

The basic scientific approach is both simple and powerful - and it has wider application than just the study of nature. The same approach is used by, for example, detectives - even fictitious ones. Hercule Poirot's little grey cells may suggest to him a likely culprit for a crime - but having thought the thought he would then relate it to all available facts of the case and investigate any new matters it suggested - just as a scientist would do. When he presents his denouement at the end of a case, he lays out all the relevant facts, and shows how they point to the culprit - he is presenting a theory based upon the known facts of the case. Applying the scientific approach is actually more tricky for a detective (or an historian, say) than for a physical scientist - a detective may well have to make value judgments about the "facts" themselves (e.g. witness statements) - whereas a scientist will usually have confidence in the basic data - it doesn’t actively try to lie or mislead.

Back to my aforementioned little chess piece. The pawn has got to the point where he is quite content with his grand theory. However, he has a nagging thought. For all his efforts and success in working out the "rules of the game", he feels that he is kidding himself if he thinks that he has actually explained anything at all, since he has not explained why the rules exist and why they have the form they do - let alone explained his own existence and that of his chessboard universe. He feels that all he has actually done is produce a description of his universe - not an explanation of it. Ultimately, all he can say is that things "just happen" to be the way they are - and he finds that to be a disturbingly inadequate explanation - indeed no "explanation" at all.


© Copyright Andrew Haynes (andychains.com)