On The Fundamentals Of Science
- by Eric Blair
Here I intend to examine some of the most fundamental assumptions of science. One of the greatest human achievements in history was the realisation that the world and its natural phenomena can be explained. At some point in history almost all of existence must have had only a supernatural explanation. The world was seen as a place controlled by gods or spirits whose existence was merely assumed as necessary to explain what otherwise could not be. But at some point it must have been realised that at least in some cases these supernatural explanations were not necessary. The tides, the seasons, the eclipse of the sun, in all these cases even if the issue could not initially be proven one way or the other it could at least be hypothesised that these phenomena could be explained without resorting to the supernatural. Theories such as these represent what we call science and are the basis for much of the achievement of modern civilisation.
The value of these scientific theories is summed up by Occam’s razor which values theories not only according to their explanatory power but also their economy of assumption. A good theory is one which assumes little and yet is able to explain much. By this standard gods and spirits are poor theories because they must postulate at least as much as they explain. The existence of a god would require at least as much explanation as the existence of seasons or the weather.
On the other hand science has had huge success in explaining the world with highly parsimonious theories. Days, seasons, tides, and eclipses are all explained using a simple model of celestial mechanics and perhaps one of the greatest achievements of all was the explanation of life through the theory of evolution. The spirit of these achievements demonstrated that the world could be explained using simple theories. By the end of the nineteenth century it seemed that the job was almost done, all the different substances in the world had been explained using the existence of merely one hundred or so elements, force and motion had been explained by Newton, light by Maxwell and even life itself had been explained using simple theories. It must have seemed almost inevitable that the few phenomena left to unravel must also be susceptible to the same simple treatment. The principle of Occam’s razor appeared to be vindicated; the best theories seemed to be the simplest.
However, we know that this state of affairs did not last. Einstein, followed by the pioneers of quantum mechanics showed that the classical theories were incomplete. They could not explain the world at the very limits of our observations. New theories were developed with the required explanatory power but this was achieved only at the expense of greater complexity. The historical trend towards ever more simple explanations of the world was reversed and more and more complicated theories were required to explain our observations of the natural world.
Today the modern theories of physics are really quite complicated. Einstein’s relativity took many of the simple laws discovered by Newton and effectively made them a little more complicated, while quantum physics went even further necessitating all sorts of strange behaviour for ordinary matter such as wave-particle duality, quantum tunnelling, and entanglement. Where the world of science once seemed quite simple it is now very complicated. What’s more, the situation is set to get even worse. Relativity and quantum mechanics certainly aren’t the last word and the theories set to replace them such as string theory contain even more weirdness, such as the possibility of extra dimensions.
To many, these considerations may seem inconsequential. Surely the most important feature of any theory is its correct description of reality. Ultimately, this may well be true, but it seems to me that science has lost something in its abandonment of simple theories. Where before there was the promise of an ultimate end, where all observation was explained by scientific theory, now the attainment of this goal is not so certain. Maybe strings will provide an ultimate theory of everything, but it may just be the next level down on what could potentially be an infinitely descending ladder. If this is so, how far down that ladder can we go? How far down are we willing to go before our theories assume as much as they can explain?
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