On the Shoulders of Giants
Jul. 8th, 2008 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesIt is the nature of science that one discovery stands upon another, and so on back to the simplest observations and most rudimentary hypotheses. On the back on Euclid's space stands Newton's optics; on the back of Newton's gravity is Einstein's relativity; on the back of Einstein, Hawking, and so on. And on the back of Newton's optics, Galileo's microscopes, Pasteur's bugs, and so on.
The names we remember are not the only ones. There are many, many other researchers clambering onto those famous shoulders: we only remember the ones whose work moved the field forward. The others were either wrong (which bears no shame), or beaten to it (which engenders deep sympathy) or charlatans who had no business being there (Fleischman, Pons, Hwang, I'm looking at you). And, of course, this is an oversimplification of a human endeavour. Still, the model serves: we clamber onto the shoulders of giants, and then we add out height to the pile, and one day maybe we'll reach high enough to see everything.
Detractors of science often take the route of pulling down one of the guys on the top of the pile, and then saying, "See? Scientists! They're all rubbish!" Which is, needless to say, a logical fallacy and a serious misunderstanding of the whole nature of scientific enquiry. We see this a lot right now in climate science. For example, Hurricane Bertha's track took it south of most computer models. "Pah!" say the detractors, "see how little these so-called scientists know! You can't trust 'em about climate!"
One model got it pretty close, but the detractor doesn't mention that. Which is a pity, because that model's authors are the ones most likely to stay on top of the shoulders of their predecessors. The ones he derides are not so good, but that "less than perfect" value gets shouted down to zero in the antiscience argument.
An argument often made on the internet by well-fed disease-free long-lived people in comfort in a world which is well-known. Ah, the irony: a philosophical position that science "ain't all dat", posted on bleeding-edge technology by a person doubtless treated for many previously-nasty diseases and injuries, fed on technological agriculture flown around the world, in a world of mostly-predictable weather and up-to-the-minute news. Science is all dat. Everything else is subsistence farming and shamanism.
The names we remember are not the only ones. There are many, many other researchers clambering onto those famous shoulders: we only remember the ones whose work moved the field forward. The others were either wrong (which bears no shame), or beaten to it (which engenders deep sympathy) or charlatans who had no business being there (Fleischman, Pons, Hwang, I'm looking at you). And, of course, this is an oversimplification of a human endeavour. Still, the model serves: we clamber onto the shoulders of giants, and then we add out height to the pile, and one day maybe we'll reach high enough to see everything.
Detractors of science often take the route of pulling down one of the guys on the top of the pile, and then saying, "See? Scientists! They're all rubbish!" Which is, needless to say, a logical fallacy and a serious misunderstanding of the whole nature of scientific enquiry. We see this a lot right now in climate science. For example, Hurricane Bertha's track took it south of most computer models. "Pah!" say the detractors, "see how little these so-called scientists know! You can't trust 'em about climate!"
One model got it pretty close, but the detractor doesn't mention that. Which is a pity, because that model's authors are the ones most likely to stay on top of the shoulders of their predecessors. The ones he derides are not so good, but that "less than perfect" value gets shouted down to zero in the antiscience argument.
An argument often made on the internet by well-fed disease-free long-lived people in comfort in a world which is well-known. Ah, the irony: a philosophical position that science "ain't all dat", posted on bleeding-edge technology by a person doubtless treated for many previously-nasty diseases and injuries, fed on technological agriculture flown around the world, in a world of mostly-predictable weather and up-to-the-minute news. Science is all dat. Everything else is subsistence farming and shamanism.
