MilestonesNavigating the site:
Our Journey begins entitled: “The Milestones of Modern Science”
Overview
| First Lecture - discussion | books | Feynman's
Meaning of it All
Divided into three parts our investigation of the emergent natural order of the material universe builds on the Greek and Babylonian conception of an orderly cosmos.
It proceeds to a discovery of life and all its complexity within that cosmos only to emerge in an inward journey. Ultimately, like Dante and Beatrice, we stumble upon light in the quirkiest of surroundings hiding at the material heart of reality.
Thus, cosmos, life and light are core themes we use to display
the evidence for our thesis that the world is sufficiently knowable for
us to test our assumptions, discover our errors and reveal the elusive
beauty of existence. For we are permitted to glimpse momentarily such sublime beauty
in the eternity of all things. We may peer only briefly before we change
from predator into prey, to be eaten by the very dogs with which we once hunted
that now dismember and devour us. That is the meaning of the mythology surrounding Acteon. (more*)
Any milestone is a marker alerting the traveler of how far they have traversed
a highway. If science were a pathway from the ignorance of our past to
the errors of the present day, then the milestones would indicate the
seminal concepts propelling current research and discovery into mind,
matter, energy, time, space and life, itself.
This course asks several questions to reveal how extremely our worldviews change over time. As human understanding of natural existence has changed from the pre-Socratic ideas embedded in Aristotle to the present, serious questions arise about the essence and origins of universal, physical conditions.
Science, is defined as more than a certain kind of knowledge?
I would like tonight to speak to you about the the significant, distinguishing features, or characteristics among: thorough thinking, analogous thought and refutable conceptualizations.
I would like tonight to speak to you about the significant, distinguishing features, or characteristics among: thorough thinking, analogous thought and refutable concepts. Any and all conceptualizations could be wholly imaginative, that is to say fictitious or uncertain, and it could --on the other hand-- be an accurate indicator of our conditions.
These phrases --thorough thinking, analogous thought and refutable concepts-- may all seem to be synonymous; one for the other and all for one. Alas I hope to show that they are not equal and that they correspond in a series that forms a sort of pyramid of associations to less and less rigorous ways to describe reality. That is what we see, how we explain that observation and when we can predict what may occur under those same circumstances differ according to the rigor used in challenging our biased assumptions.
We do this because, so I think, we are prone to error. We easily make mistakes. SO I suggest we build this pyramid of knowledge, with the apex as a rare, predictive and testable form of knowing. That is the form of knowledge that we will call science and it will be divided into the physical and largely unvarying sciences (once called natural philosophy) –and the life sciences that all possess a temporal variation in that time is a significant component of varying outcomes in the life sciences. Once called natural history, as the term implies, if you reverse time in the life sciences some very strange and impossible situations arise, whereas time reversal in physical science has a very different sort of outcome.
Because Feynman in the Meaning of It All suggests that science is not strictly speaking and merely “ordered” thought, the three phrases “thorough thinking, analogous thought and refutable conceptualizations” will be considered in reverse order. I do this because I want to interpret the author and make my point that science is not a search for truth or the mastery of authority. According to Feynman, and before him Jacob Bronowski a famous mathematician and interpreter of science and the arts, science is a quest for sensible and testable “new ideas” because as Bronowski insists, “science” is a set of disciplines “on the edge of error.” (Ascent of Man)
Or as Feynman argues “The more definite the statement, the more important it is to test.” He believes that because “We have a way of checking whether an idea is correct or not.” By that Feynman says “We simply test it against observation,” which is difficult indeed, despite his use of the word “simply.” But it does establish his factual statement that ”There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.” And it is here that we have the most significant concept with respect to modernity and the history of thought. We live at a time, despite the tide otherwise among a widespread number of divergent groups, when “We have lost the need to go to an authority to find out if an idea is true or not,” as Feynman argues (p. 22) in his initial lecture.
To be quite clear, we decide truth by testing a concept for accuracy and determining to what extent it is in error; we do not test “goodness” in the sciences based on the intensity of one’s logic, the “feel of one’s reason, or the hope of discovering supporting evidence. No one tests by finding exceptions, errors and seeks to account for the ever present uncertainties in our experimental evidence and mathematical accounts or descriptive explanations of those real tests of anyone’s assumptions.
By applying this strict definition of science as a means of determining uncertainty and the degree of error in our reason, Feynman says “”we can try it out; and find out if it is true or not.” (p. 21) That is not because an Einstein or a Faraday said so, but because the evidence we use to test the concept verifies the hypothesis.
So even on the level of thorough thinking, true may seem like the opposite of error and thus using analogous thought you insist “science is the search for truth.” You may even say, because Feynman, an authority on light and nuclear forces, said that science is a means of testing “if it is not true….” (Ibid.) that our scientists discover truths. Worse yet you may –by a judicious, nut mistaken—use of analogy tell me that the priests and priestesses of the pagan past are the analogs of the men and women scientists today who “seek the truth.” Why quibble you say over how the search for error is qualitatively different from the seeking out of truths?
This thinking – analogical analysis – breaking things down into comparable concepts that make up a bigger whole is after all what serious thinking is all about. Yet in his last lecture, I believe this fallacy of conflating thorough thinking with scientific search for errors and uncertainty is why Feynman talks about witch doctors and makes the spurious analogy (see he uses analogous thinking) between witch doctors and psychiatrists. Might I suggest to you that the search for error in any idea, concept and especially a belief system, is of quite significant difference from searching for truth; in both the means of discovery and the things discovered and refutable conceptualizations. That is in part why he refers to gravity and the inverse square law as an example of a testable – or what I will call a refutable rule—that is precisely accurate because (ironically) you can try to disprove it.
Now thinking and thought involve concepts, what Richard Feynman calls "new ideas." As he suggests we need words "to express ideas." (116) We need a lot more words than we have to convey accurately the conditions we now understand as universal (everywhere) and predictive (inverse square law).“That it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle. It is not understood at all but it leads to the possibility of prediction—that means it tells you what you would expect to happen in an experiment you have not done.” (page 23)
“No. Its nowhere near as good as a proposition that the planets move about the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center.” (p.19) He clarifies by saying that “the second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance.” Furthermore, Feynman argues that the prediction “is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong.” (p.24)
I will return to this significant distinction I am making between accurate, less uncertain, bodies of knowledge and the “search for truth,” because as he reminds us science is more than just thorough thinking. Science may also be more than just testing the observable or testing a hypothesis by collecting evidence to refute your assumptions. Nevertheless, why is science not the same as “knowledge of the truth?” Is it because long ago William of Ockham suggested that we do not needlessly complicate our explanation of events if we are rigorous thinkers? Yes but also no. It is because an experiment, any experiment, if well constructed to test assumptions and carefully observed to rule out uncertainties has more than a simple outcome.
I hope to convince you that there are not merely affirming or denying results in any experimental test of a “new idea” or many authorities’ assumptions. Yes, an experiment may verify a hunch, it may refute the hypothesis we are testing, but what if it does neither. Truth is not the opposite of error, or a state of being error-free, or even limiting the degrees of error, because experiments can have a third, undecipherable outcome. These unconvincing outcomes of experiments neither support, nor refute the hypothesis, but they remain inconclusive.Among the more famous of these experiments, conducted at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio by professor’s Michelson and Morley in the 1880s is just such an experiment. Both men hoped to discover the existence of Isaac Newton’s hypothesized fluid called “ether” by measuring the period of light waves moving in the same direction or opposite the earth and those moving at right angles to the Earth’s motion about the sun. Everywhere the men measured light traveled at precisely the same speed. For twenty-five years people argued about the ether expanding and contracting, until Albert Einstein had a new idea. My point here is that thorough thinking, analogous thought and refutable conceptualizations are not the same thing because when experimental evidence is reviewed it may support a “new idea.” The experiment tests and refutes the assumption based on analogous thought or thorough thinking, or the experimental test of an observation may remain inconclusive.
My argument tonight is among one of many reasons why Feynman sees that uncertainty is a valuable asset when searching for errors (or truths). In science, if it is careful, accurate and predictable scientific information, the concept must pass the test. We must be able to make a thesis statement that can be refuted; otherwise, the meaning for science is not limited sufficiently on which to base any reliable observation. As you will see observation alone is insufficient to determine whether Claudius Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, or Johannes Kepler is the more correct about the cosmic structure of the solar system. But that is next week’s discussion.
Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All, (1963)
Science is
- How we find things out, or method
- The body of knowledge of what we found out,
- What we do with what we discover (technology).
R. Feynman, The Meaning of it All, p. 5.
Now thinking and thought involve concepts, what Richard Feynman calls "new ideas." As he suggests we need words "to express ideas." (116)
We need a lot more words than we have
to convey accurately the cond
itions we now understand as universal (everywhere)
and predictive (inverse square law). (pp. 19-20. 23).
inverse square law, "Proportional to the masses of two different and separated objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between these two defined objects."
Richard Feynman, author of Quantum Electrodynamics, Feynman diagrams and several books for nonscientists about his life and his unfathomable curiosity for material things. Dr. Feynman, a native New Yorker (Brooklyn), was a physicist at Cal Tech for all of his professional life after his work on the Manhattan Project, and teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca. He served on the Commission investigating the causes of the Columbia space ship disaster in which all the astronauts on board perished on take-off. Feynman publicly rebuked the technicians for not understanding the basic impact of freezing or cold temperatures on the materials that make o-ring seals. The failure of these "o-ring" seals, a simple device brought down a complex machine causing the loss of human life.
Outrageous: frend is spoken, friend is spelling the sound correctly as opposed to freind. (Find, feind, fend, fen, fin, phennig, phenol, fennel ... irregularity of language and the regularity of reason.) So"Have we got too many words, No, No....Have we got too many words, No." (page 116, The Meaning of it All)
Underlying similarity in materials, origins, and functions is one current finding of scientists.
 |
Atoms are everywhere and in everything but planets behave according to very different patterns than those we observe in atomic nuclei. |  |
| Planetary model of atoms |
 |
Gell-Mann's quarks in a neutron |
| "And again, it has been discovered that all the world is made of the same atoms, that the stars are the same stuff as ourselves." | ||
Earth and time are products of cosmic forces and neutron decay
Deep time -- "the long slow process of evolution"
p. 10
geological reconstruction from fossils, rock layers, pollen and tree rings reveals, a series of previous stages in existence where no humans, or even ancestral hominids, lived on earth.
There is evidence even for a "World without a living thing on it."
Life itself has a commonality found in:
Chlorophyll is composed of a six carbon loop, called a –porphoryn ring– that holds magnesium in a suspended state within a carbon nitrogen lattice. This is a similar structure responsible for respiration that holds either iron in hemoglobin, or copper in its place on a similar carbon-nitrogen lattice.
Chlorophyll is responsible for photosynthesis in bacteria & plants.
Proteins in bacteria & humans have the very same molecular structures that carry out respiration, by which each lives.
p. 11
“So close is life to life. The universality of the deep chemistry of living things is indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing.”
p.12
Michael Faraday's candle and Feynman's links:
"That no matter what you look at (observe & observation), if you look at it closely enough, you are involved in the entire universe."
p. 13-14.
"And so he got
despite the uncertainty, science has to be predictive
Uncertainty
“nothing can be stated precisely”
p. 25
“there is no harm in being uncertain.”
p. 26.
“All scientific knowledge is uncertain.”
“…It is of very great value , and one that extends beyond the sciences, I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right.”
pp. 26-27.
He argues that, “the rate at which you create new things to test,” is affected by the uncertainty that is recognized to persist despite our growing knowledge of material things.
p. 27.
“So what I call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty….none is absolutely certain.”
p. 27.
“How you get to know is what I want to know.”
p. 28.
“This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences.”
“It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure.”p. 28.
“…doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed, as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.”
Doubt is clearly a value in the sciences.
p. 28.
Representation of three quarks (red, green and blue dots.) in a subatomic particle such as a proton or its ancestor neutron.
Definitions of science | means of his inquiry | Writing about uncertainty | related ideas
In Greek mythology, Actaeon was the son of King Cadmus of Thebes.
While he was deer hunting he wandered away from his friends and saw Artemis bathing. Enraged, Artemis turned Actaeon into a stag. Then Actaeon's own hounds chased and killed him.
The mythology of Artemis and Acteon.
Artist's renderings:
Titian, Death of Actaeon, 1562,
Oil on canvas 179 x 189 cm National Gallery, London.
Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1559,
Oil on canvas, 190.3 x 207 cm., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
On-line Citations, suggested formats:
http://www.loggia.com/myth/cite.html
Midterm writing about worldviews and texts.
