GP 25 Web Book

Day 4
Interlude and Update: Science and Imagination

The practice of science after the death of Galileo in 1642 would have been unrecognizable to Bruno even though he would have found the behavior of the Church frighteningly familiar. By Newton’s death in 1727, astronomy and physics are recognizably modern. Why did science progress so slowly in classical and medieval times?  The lack of imagination associated with magical thinking was one major obstacle.

The methods of science in actual practice differ from those of pseudoscience and religion.  Eudoxio captures the traits of pseudoscience.  He stops scientific inquiry at every turn. He is quick to invoke magic.  He distrusts even careful observations. When pressed he retreats to a reference to the authority of ancient woodsmen.  He is unwilling to abandon tradition.  Further pressed, he insists that any attempt at serious study will lead to disaster and that the woods were created for mankind’s benefit.  Finally, he contends that nature is inscrutable.  He is able answer everything.  For him, all problems are solved without taxing his brain.

The circular reasoning that the role of spiders is to protect us from mosquitoes and that the mosquito is here to feed the spider is still common in K-12 science books but not in serious ecology.  It is the Natural Theology of William Paley.  The most common K-12 form is that altruistic predators are here to prevent the prey from overpopulating and starving and to improve the prey by weeding out the old, weak, and sick.  Never mind that some predators do starve for lack of prey or even that there is seldom enough weak and sick prey to go around.  Do sharks regularly invade hospitals to avoid having to eat young healthy strong surfers?

Rustico and Lithophilo on their own could come up with a clever scheme for monitoring porcupines in their dens. Eudoxio would never think about one.  A lack of imagination is a hallmark of pseudoscience and magic.  Check out the Iliad.

Achilles has the full resources of a Greek God. Yet this magic gets him only an improved version of the shields and armor already on the field.  An atomic weapon or even a Civil War cannon would have been more effective but would have required inventive genius, not magic.

You may be saying: The Iliad is poetry. Fantasy and science fiction serve only to create remote and therefore politically correct venues for adventure, poetry, and social commentary. Thus technology and magic need merely not be so ludicrous that they spoil the plot. No, look at the early Star Treks, a series where there was a serious attempt to present a self-consistent advanced technology.  The computer has numerous tape drives, now after 30 years antiques.  Checking with freshmen, many younger viewers of reruns think that the tapes portray unknown advanced alien devices. Read the original H. G. Wells War of the Worlds. The Martians' poison gas, heat rays, and tripod walkers are still formidable, but not overwhelming 107 years later.

A belief in magic was not all that hindered the progress of science before 1600.  Such beliefs continued after that but did not halt science.  Kepler practiced astrology.  Newton considered that God tinkered with planetary orbits.  Creation was the standard before Darwin.   The lack of modern technology and equipment is obvious but less limiting than one might suspect.  For example, we estimated the distance of the stars without a telescope.

Classical science suffered from two serious structural problems.  The first was saving the phenomenon, rather than seeking a simple unified theory, like Newton’s laws.  A convoluted explanation, like geocentric astronomy, with some predicting power was fine since the heavens are beyond the ken of man.  The second was the lack of the modern penchant for measuring, introduced by men like Galileo. Classical and medieval scientists rarely improved or checked existing measurements or even made new ones.

Spain 1491. A brash Italian proposes to sail west to the Orient and bring back gold, silk, and spice.  This voyage will be very expensive.  Unlike the sanitized K-12 version with the royal jewels, the Queen must sell the loot seized from expelled Jews.  In either case, the source of wealth is nonrenewable and the learned men of the realm are summoned.  No one is ignorant enough to contend that the Earth is flat.  It is round, but they do not know its circumference.  Is Cathay just over the horizon beyond known islands or an unreachable distance away?

The scholars have the measurements of the Greek mathematician Erastosthenes (276-194 BC) and those of Ptolemy.  Erastosthenes estimated using the distance that a camel could travel in a day, which left a lot to be desired. Ptolemy’s measurement over open water between Rhodes and Alexandria was fake.  The scholars do not know it but it does not matter.  The big problem is the unit of measurement, the stade.   Just what is a stade?  No one knows for sure, but no one thinks to accurately repeat the experiment with a known unit of measurement.  In fact, there have been only two repetitions since classical times, one in the Muslim world and one in China.  They are not much help because the unit problem remains.  The matter resolves itself when the Italian threatens to go to France with his services.  Columbus (1451-1506) is wrong about the circumference of the Earth.   That becomes evident in a few years.

In contrast to classical and medieval practice, modern science includes empiricism, careful systematic measurements.  It also includes logic, including mathematics.  One uses logic to generalize from the data and then to make specific testable predictions. Nothing is sacred, but practically one must presume that some things are understood, like the balance or that a microscope works, in order to test others. Practical ancients, like Archimedes (287-212 BC) and Galen (131-200), the physician to the gladiators, successfully formulated scientific hypotheses. Archimedes’ principle describes the behavior of floating bodies. Galen’s medical text was used well into the 1800s.  Gladiators were so expensive to train that wounded ones got excellent medical attention. Having even half the contestants die in each show would have been prohibitive.

Galileo often operated like a modern scientist, but he retained the ancient notion that scientific propositions must be proven, not just supported by overwhelming observations.  Making the Copernican system a testable hypothesis for further study was not an available compromise in 1616.

As Galileo had hoped, science has reached an uneasy truce with religion.  Science is methodologically materialist.  One cannot invoke magic.  Science is agnostic, but scientists may be religious, agnostic, or atheists.  Science, like U.S. courts, stays out of matters of faith.  It gets dragged in when objective claims are made or when it comes under religious attack.

Pseudoscience is a relatively new phenomenon dating from the rise of the prestige of science in the seventeen hundreds.  It dons the trappings of science, but is bound by tradition and magical thought.  Its guises when disrobed are more appropriate to the dark ages.

Mysticism rejects both experiment and logic often selectively.  It has resurfaced in academic raiment with Brobdignagian words like postmodernism and in more medieval garb as new age healing and astrology. Its absolute relativism of no objective reality can become doctrinaire.  “We cannot show which idea is correct so mine must be right.”  Yet there must be some order to nature even for an oxcart to work.  Typically, mysticism involves a quotidian reality, like one should not stand in front of a moving bus, and a more lofty reality where anything goes.

Blind empiricism rejects generalizing from the data. A penchant for measuring often pays off especially when the level of ignorance is too high to begin theorizing. Some caution is always warranted in generalizing from data. A collecting-data-before-thinking approach, once common in geology departments, is inefficient. I have seen students with this philosophy fail to gather the relevant information at remote inaccessible field areas.  When they come back and then learn some  additional physics, they could not easily get back to their remote study area to reconsider their observations. In practice, their field programs were slave to some outmoded theory.

In the end, blind empiricism is simply impractical. It is impossible to do all conceivable experiments. For example, we cannot check out all sequences of 150 DNA base pairs. (This would be a tiny start at empirical science. Our genome alone has 3200 million base pairs.) There are 4 possible base pairs so there are 4 multiplied by itself 150 times or about 10⁹⁰ (1 with 90 zeros) possibilities. There are about this many atoms in the observable universe.  The practicing scientist needs some sort of theory to make observation tractable.

A hard-to-teach skill of practicing scientists is how far to push generalizations from the data. Having a range of opinions from conservative to wildly speculative probably helps.  Stating that nature is unfathomable and that we should not try to figure it out is an admission of defeat. Today, selective excessive empiricism is a fallback of new-age mystics. “You did not show that my cat can’t levitate.  It only had a bad day.”

The medieval scholastics reasoned from biblical premises that they would not question no matter what the evidence. To function, scholastics selectively invoke excessive empiricism. The more open-minded prosecutors of Galileo were willing to believe their eyes with a telescope, but unwilling to generalize that the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter were strong evidence for the Copernican system that they contended conflicted with the Bible.  So called Creation Science keeps this tradition alive and well.

Eudoxio invokes in secrecy another hindrance to scientific progress. There are of course military and trade secrets today, but most of basic science is public. Conversely, secrecy serves to hide ignorance and incompetence. The military does this some, but a quack doctor is a better example. If he really had a cure for all types of cancer, wouldn’t he publish it, live in luxury, and collect the Nobel Prize?

In the early days of astronomy, the ability to predict seasons and planetary motions gave the illusion of control, like with B-grade movies where the Westerner escapes cannibals by threatening to shut off the Sun just before an ellipse.  By the time of Galileo, claims of control of the visible sky, as opposed to theological Heaven, were no longer a problem in Western Europe.  The power of the guilds was waning.  Overall, secrecy was not a significant impediment to the development of Astrobiology after 1600.

Yet secret ceremonies can be fun. For example, when the need for stonemasons waned as cannons rendered castles useless for defense, the Freemasons maintained and enlarged their rituals.  The few practicing stonemasons did not. The demand for their trade has continued to decline.  Personally, my grandfather trained my father.  But my father had to do other lines of work to live.  He made no attempt to train me beyond recognizing which rocks are good to put in stone walls once he realized I was interested in geology.

Copyright Notice

back to top