Nov 19, 2023 12:12 AM
Nov 19, 2023 12:43 AM
Yep, science has stalled. Developments in the science will continue, as there's still plenty of room to innovate on existing fundamental knowledge. But paradigm shifting discoveries do seem to be over.
At the very least, the current lines of investigation seem to have come to dead ends.
At the very least, the current lines of investigation seem to have come to dead ends.
Nov 19, 2023 07:30 PM
(Nov 19, 2023 12:12 AM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW4yBSV4U38
EXTRANEOUSLY ADDED VIDEO EXCERPT: Horgan’s claim wasn’t that we’d stop doing science, but rather, in his own words, “that there would be no great “revelations or revolutions” anymore, no insights into nature as cataclysmic as heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, or the big bang.”
And he has indeed been right, hasn’t he? Just look at physics. All the big questions that were unanswered 40 years ago, are still unanswered today. We still don’t know what dark matter is, how to quantize gravity, or how the universe started. And it’s true in all other scientific disciplines too, we still don’t know how life began, what consciousness is, how to become immortal, and we still don’t know why socks disappear in washing machines.
I have a weekly science news show and a science newsletter, and it might seem like I’d be the last person in the world to agree with Horgan, but I think he has a point.
He wasn’t even the first to raise the issue. I came across this first in a book by John Barrow called “Impossibility”. Barrow had a logically very compelling argument. He said, knowledge about the laws of nature is either finite or it isn’t. And we’ll either find out all there is to know, or we won’t. If the knowledge is infinite, and we’re really good at figuring it out, science will go on forever. But if the knowledge is either finite, or we have a finite capacity for figuring it out, we’ll reach a limit.
We have no way of knowing what we don’t know, so it’s a real possibility that science will end, the question is just when.
It's more like "science as we know it" will come to an end, due to decolonization of knowledge. As the historical and still continuing "oppression and bigotry" of our Western standards are replaced and integrated with the former beliefs and customs of local native populations and applicable ethnic groups, a form of "mongrel science" will arise that's more akin to the massive flexibility of Hollywood and Comic Book science.
Due to such "inclusiveness" of that varied and far less restricted human imagination of the pre-Enlightenment past, countless new developments are guaranteed (albeit "de-progress" from the old perspective).
I doubt that handing the procession of science over to super-advanced AI and robot artilects in the future will make much difference, since those programs will still be retaining all the social justice, radical parity, and anti-Western ideology they were programmed with to regulate them in this era (our wonderful Gramsci descended legacy). If the premises plugged into their procedural process (logic and guiding methodology) are a form of impaired reality to begin with, then what's spit out from those operations are going to be ___, too.
Nov 20, 2023 06:45 PM
Here's a mild example of the decolonization of knowledge movement as utilized by the humanities scholars of the despised West itself, in trying to chip away at the supposed European origins and influences of science standards and values as a bigoted myth. And consequently undermining the latter and gradually broadening the enterprise to be open to different multicultural approaches, beliefs, and conceptions. (That incremental strategy of boiling the frog -- of creeping up on an establishment's cognition so slowly that it never even notices it has been bought by a new owner -- via what seem to be initially harmless or morally noble arguments -- has yielded excellent results for Leftangelicals over the latter half of the 20th-century to this day.)
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A recent book takes a dim view of the Europe-centric view of the origin of science.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/...evolution/
INTRO: How did science get started? A few years back, we looked at one answer to that question in the form of a book called The Invention of Science. In it, British historian David Wootton places the origin within a few centuries of European history in which the features of modern science—experiments, models and laws, peer review—were gradually aggregated into a formal process of organized discovery.
But that answer is exquisitely sensitive to how science is defined. A huge range of cultures engaged in organized observations of the natural world and tried to identify patterns in what they saw. In a recent book called Horizons, James Poskett places these efforts firmly within the realm of science and arrives at his subtitle: "The global origins of modern science." He de-emphasizes the role of Europe and directly dismisses Wootton's book via footnote in the process.
Whether you find Poskett's broad definition of science compelling will go a long way to explain how you feel about the first third of the book. The remaining two-thirds, however, are a welcome reminder that, wherever it may have started, science quickly grew into an international effort and matured in conversation with international cultural trends like colonialism, nationalism, and Cold War ideologies.
Thinking broadly
Poskett waits all of one paragraph before declaring it a "myth" that science's origin involved figures like Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, he places it not so much elsewhere as nearly everywhere—in astronomical observatories along the Silk Road and in Arabic countries, in catalogs of Western Hemisphere plants by the Aztecs, and in other efforts that were made to record what people had seen of the natural world.
Some of those efforts, as Poskett makes clear, required the organized production of information that we see in modern science. Early astronomical observatories boosted accuracy by constructing enormous buildings structured to enable the measurement of the position of heavenly bodies—hugely expensive projects that often required some form of royal patronage. Records were kept over time and were disseminated to other countries and cultures, another commonality with modern science. Some of this activity dates back all the way to Babylon.
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Yet all this information production is still missing some things that are commonly seen as central to science. Astronomers in many countries figured out ways of calculating the patterns in the movements of planets and timing of eclipses. But there's little indication that any of them recognized that those patterns reflected a small number of underlying principles or that their predictions could be improved by creating a mental picture of what was happening in the heavens. Without things like models and laws to pair with the observations they explain, can we really call this science?
Poskett's answer would be a decisive yes, though there's no indication in this book that he ever considered that a question in the first place. In fact, his definition of science is even broader (and probably on even weaker ground) when he refers to things like an Aztec herbalism manual as science... (MORE - details)
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A recent book takes a dim view of the Europe-centric view of the origin of science.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/...evolution/
INTRO: How did science get started? A few years back, we looked at one answer to that question in the form of a book called The Invention of Science. In it, British historian David Wootton places the origin within a few centuries of European history in which the features of modern science—experiments, models and laws, peer review—were gradually aggregated into a formal process of organized discovery.
But that answer is exquisitely sensitive to how science is defined. A huge range of cultures engaged in organized observations of the natural world and tried to identify patterns in what they saw. In a recent book called Horizons, James Poskett places these efforts firmly within the realm of science and arrives at his subtitle: "The global origins of modern science." He de-emphasizes the role of Europe and directly dismisses Wootton's book via footnote in the process.
Whether you find Poskett's broad definition of science compelling will go a long way to explain how you feel about the first third of the book. The remaining two-thirds, however, are a welcome reminder that, wherever it may have started, science quickly grew into an international effort and matured in conversation with international cultural trends like colonialism, nationalism, and Cold War ideologies.
Thinking broadly
Poskett waits all of one paragraph before declaring it a "myth" that science's origin involved figures like Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, he places it not so much elsewhere as nearly everywhere—in astronomical observatories along the Silk Road and in Arabic countries, in catalogs of Western Hemisphere plants by the Aztecs, and in other efforts that were made to record what people had seen of the natural world.
Some of those efforts, as Poskett makes clear, required the organized production of information that we see in modern science. Early astronomical observatories boosted accuracy by constructing enormous buildings structured to enable the measurement of the position of heavenly bodies—hugely expensive projects that often required some form of royal patronage. Records were kept over time and were disseminated to other countries and cultures, another commonality with modern science. Some of this activity dates back all the way to Babylon.
Advertisement
Yet all this information production is still missing some things that are commonly seen as central to science. Astronomers in many countries figured out ways of calculating the patterns in the movements of planets and timing of eclipses. But there's little indication that any of them recognized that those patterns reflected a small number of underlying principles or that their predictions could be improved by creating a mental picture of what was happening in the heavens. Without things like models and laws to pair with the observations they explain, can we really call this science?
Poskett's answer would be a decisive yes, though there's no indication in this book that he ever considered that a question in the first place. In fact, his definition of science is even broader (and probably on even weaker ground) when he refers to things like an Aztec herbalism manual as science... (MORE - details)
Nov 20, 2023 07:50 PM
Kind of Part 2 of the last....
30 years ago scientists were confronting the "fashionable nonsense" of left scholars and postmodern philosophers in the Science wars. Now, in the "human centered" soft sciences, they've been reduced to being their complying stooges. Brockman (partial quote below) was arguably overly optimistic about the "traditional intellectual" shrinking and a third culture hanging around long enough to put up continued resistance. At least with respect to their continuing legacy and offshoots in politics, and influence on the administrators of educational and research institutions. Of the "two cultures", it's the intelligentsia that is now pulling the strings of the scientists.
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John Brockman (Sep 9, 1991): In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s.
Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others.
This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.
How did the literary intellectuals get away with it?
First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists, notably Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, also wrote books for a general audience, their works were ignored by the self-proclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.
In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists...
30 years ago scientists were confronting the "fashionable nonsense" of left scholars and postmodern philosophers in the Science wars. Now, in the "human centered" soft sciences, they've been reduced to being their complying stooges. Brockman (partial quote below) was arguably overly optimistic about the "traditional intellectual" shrinking and a third culture hanging around long enough to put up continued resistance. At least with respect to their continuing legacy and offshoots in politics, and influence on the administrators of educational and research institutions. Of the "two cultures", it's the intelligentsia that is now pulling the strings of the scientists.
- - - - - - - - - - -
John Brockman (Sep 9, 1991): In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s.
Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others.
This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.
How did the literary intellectuals get away with it?
First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists, notably Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, also wrote books for a general audience, their works were ignored by the self-proclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.
In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists...
Nov 21, 2023 07:42 PM
My doubts about the end of science (Horgan himself chimes in)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-do...of-science
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): Sabine Hossenfelder takes a hard look at my end-of-science thesis in this video. I have doubts about my thesis too, as I confess below...
[...] my ongoing quantum project has forced me to question a key premise of The End of Science, that science has given us an accurate map of reality. Yes, quantum mechanics accounts for countless experiments, and its applications have transformed our world, but it calls all our knowledge into question. Experts cannot agree on what quantum theory tells us about the nature of matter, energy, space, time, mind.
In The End of Science, I say particle physics “rests on the firm foundation of quantum mechanics.” Firm foundation? What a joke! The more I study quantum mechanics, the more physics resembles a house of cards. Floating on a raft. On a restless sea. Physics seems wobbly, ripe for revolution, for a paradigm shift that sends science veering off in unexpected directions.
[...] Maybe we shouldn’t think of mathematical theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity as true. Maybe we should view the theories as calculating devices that predict experimental outcomes but have an obscure relation to nature.
I’ve become more sympathetic toward a philosophical outlook called pluralism. Just because a theory works does not mean it is “The Truth”; there might be many other theories out there just as effective, or more effective...
[...] I explored possibilities like these at the end of The End of Science, in a chapter titled “Scientific Theology, or the End of Machine Science.” The chapter focuses on the visions of physicists ... who prophesied that our ancestors will evolve into a cosmic computer with godlike powers.
I predicted that this hi-tech deity in the far, far future would try to solve the mystery of its own existence, but it would fail, because there is no answer to the riddle... (MORE - missing details)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-do...of-science
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): Sabine Hossenfelder takes a hard look at my end-of-science thesis in this video. I have doubts about my thesis too, as I confess below...
[...] my ongoing quantum project has forced me to question a key premise of The End of Science, that science has given us an accurate map of reality. Yes, quantum mechanics accounts for countless experiments, and its applications have transformed our world, but it calls all our knowledge into question. Experts cannot agree on what quantum theory tells us about the nature of matter, energy, space, time, mind.
In The End of Science, I say particle physics “rests on the firm foundation of quantum mechanics.” Firm foundation? What a joke! The more I study quantum mechanics, the more physics resembles a house of cards. Floating on a raft. On a restless sea. Physics seems wobbly, ripe for revolution, for a paradigm shift that sends science veering off in unexpected directions.
[...] Maybe we shouldn’t think of mathematical theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity as true. Maybe we should view the theories as calculating devices that predict experimental outcomes but have an obscure relation to nature.
I’ve become more sympathetic toward a philosophical outlook called pluralism. Just because a theory works does not mean it is “The Truth”; there might be many other theories out there just as effective, or more effective...
[...] I explored possibilities like these at the end of The End of Science, in a chapter titled “Scientific Theology, or the End of Machine Science.” The chapter focuses on the visions of physicists ... who prophesied that our ancestors will evolve into a cosmic computer with godlike powers.
I predicted that this hi-tech deity in the far, far future would try to solve the mystery of its own existence, but it would fail, because there is no answer to the riddle... (MORE - missing details)
Nov 22, 2023 12:10 AM
Horgan Wrote:.. Experts cannot agree on what quantum theory tells us about the nature of matter, energy, space, time, mind.Newton's Laws of Motion are (probably) the last bit of physics that's going to 'work' for people. Even dogs know those laws because they apply directly to dogs (as well as humans).
[...............]
Maybe we shouldn’t think of mathematical theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity as true. Maybe we should view the theories as calculating devices that predict experimental outcomes but have an obscure relation to nature.
Distance dog travels = (time dog travels for) x (speed dog travels at)
Dogs don't run into things because they know about acceleration and stopping distance and running into things at any speed hurts.
Beyond Newtons Laws we can only calculate .. for obvious (?) reasons. Behave like an electron - I don't think so.
If you do lots of calculations using the same model (eg Special Relativity) you start to be able to make reasonable guesses even before you do any calculations. That's probably as far as any model is going to 'work' for a human (or dog). Maybe people could try harder to simulate what it would 'feel' like to be an electron - perhaps that's what Horgan really wants.
Nov 22, 2023 12:40 AM
“By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.”
― John Horgan, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
― John Horgan, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Nov 22, 2023 01:15 AM
(Nov 22, 2023 12:40 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]“By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.”
― John Horgan, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
I don't know where Horgan got this idea "One sphincter to rule them all." .. Tolkein? In the real world there's still a fair number to whom "Shut up and calculate" is like an invitation to a feast.