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In essence “It’s what we think at the moment
folks. Tomorrow it might all be
different.”
I’m grateful to Will Diver, Archaean geologist at the
It fascinated Will’s locksmith father too. But Will’s dad couldn’t get his mind round
the way ‘The Truth’ seemed to be different every time his son visited. In fact Will was only doing what scientists
always do. He was stating ‘as fact’ the
current state of play in a rapidly moving field.
We ordinary folk must get our minds round this too, if
we are not to be seriously misled.
We also have to understand the difficulties
specialists have with communication. I’ve been a specialist in various
different fields in my time. So I can
see this problem from both sides. It is
extremely difficult for a specialist to see beyond his or her own nose. And we invariably grossly over-estimate the
importance of our work in the overall scheme of things. For example, I once thought that all the
world’s problems would be solved if only everybody understood Transfer
Functions.
And scientists can be wrong. We know this, because other scientists
regularly flatly contradict them.
You are not going to believe this unless you have met
it, but ‘inexact’ scientists are jealous of us physicists. The phenomenon of physics envy was first
described to me by a palaeo-botanist, now eminent in this field. We’ll preserve his anonymity in case he has
changed his views. But I have also seen
scientists accusing each other of it in print.
“This is Physics envy” one scientist thundered, furious at the writings
of another.
Physics is widely regarded as Top Science, because it
is ‘exact’. Its theories are simple and
elegant. And they are always followed to
the letter; except when they are not (Big Bang). As
an ex-physicist I don’t see anything special in physics at all.
I think engineering is a far better model, for any
inexact scientist lacking the self-confidence to do his or her own thing. We engineers have theories too, some very
simple and elegant. The difference is
that we have learned never to trust them until we have checked them out – over
their entire envelope of operation.
But many inexact scientists have fallen for the
physicists’ spin. For generations they
have been trying to raise the status of their respective sciences by attempting
to prove that they are exact too. They
devise simple theories for the natural world to obey. And the natural world fails to oblige. The result is gargantuan battles between
different camps, over which over-simplified theory (sometimes grossly so) is
‘correct’. And they are still doing
it. One meets the phenomenon of the
‘acrimonious debate’ quite often in the literature.
The disinterested reader such as Will’s dad can often
leap ten years ahead of both camps, by applying a bit of common sense. If there’s genuine evidence for both sides of
the argument, then both sides are probably partly right. And the truth of the matter is likely to end
up much more complicated than either side can afford to admit. This sticks out a mile to you, me and Will’s
dad. But it may take ten years until a
new generation of scientists comes along with the freshness of mind to see it.
So please don’t assume that scientists are always
right. They are as human, and as capable
of being wrong, as the rest of us.
© C B Pease, February 08