That’s a good point… my company has signed all of our computers to www.ud.com/home.htm. The combined power of pcs being used to figure things out… great idea.
But I think that’s my point. Science has traditionally (Newton and since) relied upon observation via the senses to explain things. The moment we start using deduction, even if it employs ‘global brains’, then we are no longer being scientific in the current sense. (Or are we?)
As Mangetout argues ’ OK, quarks and so on may be too small to see, that may always remain the case, but we can deduce a lot about them by the way that they affect other things (in much the same way as we can deduce things about the nature of air molecules by the way that they knock smoke particles about -the classic school experiment to observe Brownian motion).
Here we are able to ‘observe’ the effect and not the cause. Progressively, we may be liable to resort speculation or deduction (based on cause and effect) as a key way of understanding things in circumstances where current scientific methodology cannot be used easily e.g. quarks
Perhaps we’ll have to redefine science so that deduction or informed speculation are as acceptable as ‘observed through the senses’ approaches?
There’s no difference; when you look at your keyboard, it’s not really the keyboard that you’re seeing, it’s photons that are bouncing off it, you can deduce that there’s a keyboard there by the pattern that the reflected photons produce on your retina.
Am I the only one who read the OP as a thinly-veiled attempt of trying to wrangle a “there might be a God” ‘confession’ from the scientifically-oriented folks on this board?
We’ve got Quark Incorporated, Quark Expeditions, Quark the Quake Engine editor, Quark the TV show, Quark Biotech, Inc., and of course, Quark the bartender from ST:DS9.
So I think it’s good to bear in mind that your Google results are completely unfiltered. A search on “quark particle physics” yields only 28,000 hits. A big number, yes, but nowhere near your original results.
(Errr, that’s the bartender from ST:DS9, rather. With no offense intended to fans, I wouldn’t be grinning at him. He’s about one step up from Neelix IMO.)
Hmmm… I see what you mean but (there’s always a but)… again, I think that’s my point.
Science is able to determine that my keyboard is here (observation through the senses). Further study reveals that it is composed of smaller components and again, observation through the senses allows us to understand those as well. But as we approach the smallest elements, science becomes progressively self-limiting.
We could ultimately be working on things that we ‘know’ exist, because we ‘observe’ their effect, but we can’t observe them directly (too small, large, far away or whatever).
Studying bacterial cultures (observable) in the lab has to be different to studying quarks (deduced)!
Not really my goal… because I suspect that it’s doomed to failure. To be honest, several threads that I’ve joined in the last month or so have challenged my ‘faith’ and my understanding of science (a good thing). I’ve directed myself to many of the reference sites that other posters have used to support their views.
I’ve hopefully made it clear that I’m pro-science and not anti-science. My view is that science and ‘faith’ are not necessarily incompatible.
However, I do suspect (from some of my visits to the above mentioned reference sites) that our current approach to science cannot be the only way for us to understand our universe. I welcome alternative views.
Fair point (and thanks for helping me to brush up on my Google skills).
Please don’t shoot me down here you guys… I am happy to be corrected (pushing back ignorance etc.) This puzzles me.
I understand that we are essentially a conglomoration of cells (no disrespect to One Cell). To be precise, 75 trillion cells, each with a unique design and purpose. (Happy to be re-educated). That’s a lot of cells.
So it goes like this… science ‘observes’ cells for the first time. World ‘accepts’ cells as one building block for life forms. Science now ‘establishes’ that humans are made of 75 trillion of the blighters! (Is this through observation or deduction?)
Science begins to study cells… can it study all 75 trillion or at some stage, will have to rely increasingly on deduction, inference etc? In other words, the complexity is too great to deal with. At what point does science say, ‘Okay, we know a lot about cells but we can’t know everything… the job’s too big’. In this sense, isn’t it self-limiting?
I know that there are M&Ms in the big ol’ bag beside my desk. I don’t need to directly look at all of them to know they’re M&Ms. Sure, there are a few that got mangled in the process of their creation, but I’ve seen enough regular and mangled M&Ms to know that they’re all candy-covered chocolate. And I don’t have to look into every single bag of M&Ms on the planet to know that they’re all candy-covered chocolate.
Do I then decide that I cannot know everything about M&Ms because there are just too many of them to observe directly?
Sure, there’s some induction involved. Obviously there’s no way to look at 75 trillion anythings. But that doesn’t mean we cannot know what those 75 trillion things are and how they behave. It’s not too big a job if it’s broken down into managable parts.
Interesting, guys. I suppose the first thing we must do is to reach a common understanding of what science IS before we can decide if it will ever be exhausted. To me, the crux of science is the theory. That is, observations alone are utterly useless without a predictive explanation for why we observe what we do; science is not really about seeing what there is to see, but rather about finding principles that explain the observations.
As such, I think there ARE definite limits on science; there should be a finite number of fundamental principles. For example, knowing enough about physics allows you in principle to explain most everything in chemistry. On matters of engineering (which I would define as applying scientific principles in some creative process), I would make no such claim, but I also think we have to distinguish between the two.
walor, why are you so concerned about physical (and, apparently, unaided) observation?
We haven’t been limited to direct observation since Leeuwenhoek (actually, Jansen) and Galileo. Given that we are actually accomplishing things with the “inferred” observations that we are now making, why does direct observation have to be a part of the equation?
As I noted earlier, we have actually “used” the gravity of a star (or, probably, a black hole) that bent light to look beyond it. When we mess around with building genes or etching circuit boards or developing nanomachines, we find that we can change the performance of crops and computers in observable and predictable ways–meaning our “inferred” observations have been correct.
I just don’t see why there should be a limit to how far “down” or “up” we go.
Walor, I don’t like to labour a point, but exactly where do you draw the line between direct observation (through the senses) and observation that is reliant on instruments;
I can see to drive and walk about.
I wear spectacles; without them I can’t read fine print.
I can’t study the library microfiche without a viewer.
I can’t observe the behaviour of an Amoeba without a microscope.
I need an electron microscope to look closer still.
I need a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical composition of something
And so on
the point being that as time goes on, our methods of observing smaller and smaller things get better and more reliable. The point at which we say “Nope, can’t be done” is decided by us, not set by the universe.
Walor, it seems to me that you seriously misunderstand how science works. You’re drawing a dividing line between “things we see directly” and “things we know from inference,” but in reality there is no such line.
As has already been pointed out, your eyes are instruments. Why value their results over those of, say, an electron microscope?
Moreover, scientists have always relied on inference. Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth, but he didn’t do so by eyeballing the earth on a table and making a guesstimate of its size. Or take Galileo: you might think that his experiments involved direct observation, as opposed to inference, but think of it this way: he sees a pendulum swing. So what? He drops some objects off a tower. Who cares? What matters is that he inferred the existence of an underlying rule, which he could not see directly.
Even your own example shows how fuzzy the dividing line is. You say that there’s a difference between bacteria and quarks, but have you ever seen a bacterium without instruments? When I grow bacteria in the lab, I’m interested in their DNA; I have to label my cultures carefully, because the DNA is invisible. Does that make the cultures as “inferential” as quarks?
For that matter, you’ve probably never seen Outer Mongolia, not even through a telescope. Does that make it more inferential than the moon, which you’ve seen with your naked eyes?
Well, maybe that’s the problem for me to get my head around. Would it be fair to say though that ‘things I know from inference’ require me to place trust in them? As it is, I only have evidence of their effect… in a sense, circumstantial evidence. Indeed, are scientists having to place their ‘trust’ in some things that have not been directly observed.
I don’t and realise that I may have misled you here. As far as I’m concerned I’m happy that results shown by an electron microscope are as evidential as those seen with my own eyes. Both represent observation through the senses (which I thought was pretty important to scientific rigour).
The bit I struggle with is the ‘implied’ observations mentioned above. e.g. No one has seen, touched, smelled, heared a quark (to the best of my knowledge). So are we not replacing the ‘certainty’ of something that is directly observed, with the ‘presumption’ of that which is not.
As our work reveals the increasing complexity of our reality (back to my 75 trillion cells or andros’ M&Ms), so we will need to shift our emphasis onto ‘presumption and trust’ rather than observed certainty.
You’re correct on the first count. I never did visit Outer Mongolia (although I suspect people have wished me there sometimes :eek: )
However, I trust that OM exists because whilst I have not observed it, others have.
And there lies the difficulty, as I see it. As our methods allow us to see smaller & smaller particles, or bigger and bigger, or further and further, we become more aware of the complexity and ‘boundless’ dimensions of what we are studying. IMHO we will know more and more about less and less. How many of the 75 trillion cells will we ‘know’ through direct observation and how many through ‘inference’ or ‘presumtion’? (That’s a big job for someone to complete, even with One Cell’s ‘global brain’.)
And what if our work takes us to levels below the cell… we are now looking at sub-sets of 75 trillion items. Won’t we have to consider something else, alongside of current scientific rigour if we wish to understand?
Everything is inference or presumption and everything is taken on trust; you just have to decide where you’re going to put the (arbitrary) line, you trust the evidence of your eyes (with good reason), you trust what you see through a telescope or microscope, also with good reason, you might be doubtful about quarks, bosons and gravitons, but that’s OK, because we have less experience with them.
The frontier moves though, chiefly because of the way that the scientific process works; we observe an effect and theorise about the underlying cause, but we also make testable predictions about what we should find if the thoery is right (or about what we should be able to find if it is wrong), if the predictions pan out, it adds weight to the theory, if not, the theory is modified/scrapped - enough of this and the theory will eventually be refined to something that, although it might be completely wrong, explains all of the possible phenomena, so Quarks might be doubtful now, but only because the theory hasn’t been around for long enough to be refined to the point that, for all intents and purposes, it can be treated as fact.
Occasionally, something comes along and tips over somet theory that was very established and had been accepted as fact, but this is rare and usually in a very narrow and esoteric field.
So yes, we may be right to hold back from trusting the scientists about quantum jiggerypokery and so on, but when it comes to the point that the phenomena so well understood (even though we can’t ‘directly’ observe them) that they are incorporated into everyday technology, then it’s going to be harder to reject them.
’ But I don’t see any other tools at our disposal to answer those questions either. Religion? Philosophy? Those are basically just guesses. Philosophy can help us learn how to think logically, but it won’t provide the answers.’
You could argue that pre-Newton, scientific rigour didn’t exist in the same way as it does now. Newton revolutionised our methods and the way we seek to understand.
Who’s to say that we won’t have to consider an approach that balances pre-Newtonian methods with post-Newtonian methods.
Science is a method for investigating (stuff). It does include underlying assumptions about the nature of the universe, but if you buy into these assumptions, then the question is not one of trusting “science” but the applicability of the theory and the quality of the data on which it is based.
The quality of a theory is to some extent based on its predictive power- the amount of trust you can put in it.
As long as you are not “anti-science”, I doubt many people here would give you much grief about what else you choose to believe in matters of theology.
Why do you say “not necessarily”? I would say that by definition they never are incompatible unless you define “faith” or God very narrowly. As pointed out before, there are some things which are outside the realm of science. If you chose to assign those things (the “why’s”) to God, I’ve got no problem with that. You’ve probably heard of “The Theory of Everything” (TOE). Maybe science will find one someday or maybe not, but even if we find a TOE, it’s not going to literally explain everything. A TOE is not going to tell us why the universe is the way it is. It’s also not going to tell us what the 11:00 news will be reporting a thousand years from now.
As far as science being “self limiting”, I can see how it could appear that way to you. If it turns out that “it’s turtles all the way down”, then science will never be able to describe every aspect of the natural universe. Even if that turns out to be the case, I don’t think that will tell us much about the question of God. Conversely, if science someday were to answer all the questions that science is designed to answer I just don’t see how that should affect someone’s faith.