As I said to Zaqvhk* earlier in the week, I have something to
get off of my chest, and dammit I’m gonna make somebody listen to me while I do
it! Now, please grab hold of your chairs and find your earplugs. It’s rant
time.
The Value of Science
Written by Dan Barnak
Assistant Researcher at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics**
I’ve had many people, both atheists and theists alike, tell
me that “Science doesn’t have all the answers and it never will be able to
discern the truth blah blah blah.” I don’t usually remember or even want to
remember all of the things people tell me about this, but I do have an answer
to this that they like to ignore.
I’m going to try and focus on the specific problem about
science not being able to determine the objective truth of reality. Yes, I do
think there is an objective reality out there. No, I’m not addressing this idea
with respect to morality. Fat chance I’ll touch that can of worms. I am going
to try and stay away from people who are ignorant of what I mean when I say
“scientific theory”, perverse science like the Creationists like to use, and
other flaws in the scientific process that get immediately debunked like
Exxon-funded research about how global warming is a fairy tale.
In fact, I’ll give in and say that, because science is a
manmade school of thought, it has a lot of flaws. Many times science predicts
something and it turns out completely wrong. The best example of this still has
to be the Michelson-Morley experiment. I’m not going into detail here, so learn
how to use Google and Wikipedia. (Behold! The great Zaq has done your Googling for you!) Now I’m going to negate this concession by
stating that even though Michelson and Morley made a prediction that was
completely off, they still managed to conclude that there was no ether. They wanted
to find the speed of the ether so badly, yet no ether was to be found and they
were forced to conclude that it didn’t exist. Now did Michelson and Morley
realize that they had stumbled across a fundamental inner working of the
universe and then went on to write the paper on Special Relativity? Nope, they
sure didn’t. This brings me to my next point.
Often times in science, we aren’t playing with a full deck
of cards. In fact we rarely are. I’d be hard pressed to think of a theory we
know absolutely everything about. The closest would probably be Electricity and
Magnetism, but even that boils down to quantum mechanics at the microscopic
level. Let’s face facts; we know absolutely jack shit about how stuff works at
the quantum level. We have a great mathematical understanding of the quantum
world, but that’s about it. I could quote Feynman, but again I encourage you to
Google yourself to a better education.
Here’s where people like to try and punch holes in science
in order to say that we don’t know anything about anything and can’t know
everything about anything ever. I’ll admit it is going to take a long time to
unravel this messy celestial ejaculation we call a universe, but science can
still get us there eventually. Also, using the fact that we don’t know
everything to say that we don’t know anything is a logical fallacy. I forget
which one, but maybe Zacghqrt* can help me out. It certainly isn’t modus pollens
when it comes to how strong this argument against science is.
Can't be of much help here. Typically no argument is even used, and if you tried to turn what these people are driving at into an actual argument you'd find that there is at least one key but unspoken premise. I'm not sure if there's a technical term for such arguments.
Let me jump right in to an example. The electron is one of
my favorite particles so I’ll use it as an example. I know, sometimes they like
to preheat fusion targets and muck up my experiments, but I still love them.
Long ago, in the age of Benny Franklin, we had no idea what the hell an
electron was. It didn’t come until JJ Thompson’s plum pudding model of the
atom. Then the charge to mass ratio was determined, we tried smashing them to
bits, we figured out their wavefunctions in the hydrogen atom, etc. Do you know
how much we know about the electron? Still not much. Some string theorists say
it is a vibrating loop of energy, others say it’s a particle with wavelike
properties called a quanton, and some people like to believe that they are
still divisible to this very day (I don’t talk to those people anymore). The
electron is a good example of something we know a lot about, but we don’t know
everything.
The electron is a conundrum that we are still working on. I
feel as though we aren’t even close to understanding what that thing is. Looking
back on all we have done and all we have figured out about it, we still know
quite a bit. Ok, I’m getting a little contradictory here. The point is that we
know many things about the nature of the electrons existence that we can’t
refute even if there are new facts that we find in the future. We know enough
about the behavior of the electron in solids to build advanced semiconductors
so that I can type this rant digitally rather than ratatatatating out on a
typewriter. We even know enough about it to make accurate predictions in future
experiments and to design new technologies around it (I have one word:
“memristor”).
Let’s recap, because this is more of an unstructured rant
than it is a point. Science has
determined many things about reality and nature that we can consider to be
solid immutable fact, like the charge of an electron. Just because we don’t
know what exactly an electron is doesn’t make this fact refutable. Science as a
process of discovery is a highly flawed thing, but it has the ability to find the
truth even when we are looking for it in the wrong places. This is the value of
science and why many people including myself consider science to be the most
powerful and useful process imagined by humans.
Deep breath. I feel
better now.
*Dan never could figure out how to spell my name :P
**The views expressed in the above post are not sanctioned
by the LLE or any of its partners and do not reflect the views of the LLE at
all.
If you
would like to send in a guest post, feel free to email: skepticzaq@gmail.com. Remember to put the words “Guest Post” in the
subject line.
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