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10-43: Someone says: βA scientist knows science like a fish knows hydrodynamics.β There is no definition of Science here. I discovered (I think I told you this before) somewhere in high school different teachers were telling me about different subjects and I could see that different teachers were talking about the same subjects in different ways. Moreover, at the same time I looked at what we were doing and it was something different again.
Now, you've probably said, "we do the experiments, you look at the data and form theories." This is most likely nonsense. Before you can collect the data you need, you must have a theory. You can't just collect a random set of data: the colors in this room, the type of bird you see next, etc., and expect them to carry some meaning. You must have some theory before collecting data. Moreover, you cannot interpret the results of experiments that you can do if you do not have a theory. Experiments are theories that have gone all the way from beginning to end. You have preconceived notions and must interpret events with this in mind.
You acquire a huge number of preconceived notions from cosmogony. Primitive tribes tell various stories around the fire, and children hear them and learn morals and customs (Ethos). If you are in a large organization, you learn rules of behavior largely by watching other people behave. As you get older, you can't always stop. I tend to think that when I look at ladies my age, I can see a glimpse of what dresses were in fashion in the days when these ladies were in college. I may be fooling myself, but that's what I tend to think. You've all seen the old Hippies who still dress and act the way they did at the time when their personality was formed. It's amazing how much you gain this way and don't even know it, and how hard it is for old ladies to relax and give up their habits, recognizing that they are no longer accepted behavior.
Knowledge is a very dangerous thing. It comes with all the prejudices you have heard before. For example, you have a prejudice that A precedes B and A is the cause of B. Okay. Day invariably follows night. Is the night the cause of the day? Or is day the cause of night? No. And another example that I really like. Poto'mac River levels correlate very well with the number of phone calls. Phone calls cause the river level to rise, so we get upset. Phone calls do not cause river levels to rise. It is raining and for this reason people call the taxi service more often and for other related reasons, for example, informing loved ones that because of the rain they will have to be delayed or something like that, and the rain causes the river level to rise.
The idea that you can tell cause and effect because one comes before the other may be wrong. This requires some caution in your analysis and your thinking and may lead you down the wrong path.
In the prehistoric period, people apparently animated trees, rivers and stones, all because they could not explain the events that took place. But Spirits, you see, have free will, and in this way what was happening was explained. But over time we tried to limit the spirits. If you made the required air passes with your hands, then the spirits did this and that. If you cast the right spells, the tree spirit will do this and that and everything will repeat itself. Or if you planted during the full moon, the harvest will be better or something like that.
Perhaps these ideas still weigh heavily on our religions. We have quite a lot of them. We do right by the gods or the gods grant us the benefits we ask for, provided, of course, that we do right by our loved ones. Thus, many ancient gods became the One God, despite the fact that there is a Christian God, Allah, a single Buddha, although now they have a succession of Buddhas. More or less of it has merged into one God, but we still have quite a lot of black magic around. We have a lot of black magic in the form of words. For example, you have a son named Charles. You know, if you stop and think, Charles is not the child himself. Charles is a baby's name, but it's not the same thing. However, very often black magic is associated with the use of a name. I write down someone's name and burn it or do something else, and it must have an effect on the person in some way.
Or we have sympathetic magic, where one thing looks similar to another, and if I take it and eat it, certain things will happen. Much of the medicine in the early days was homeopathy. If something looks similar to another, it will behave differently. Well, you know that doesn't work very well.
I mentioned Kant, who wrote a whole book, The Critique of Pure Reason, which he undertook in a large, thick volume in difficult to understand language, about how we know what we know and how we ignore the subject. I don't think it's a very popular theory about how you can be sure of anything. I'll give an example of a dialogue I've used several times when someone says they're sure of something:
- I see that you are absolutely sure?
- Without any doubts.
- No doubt, okay. We can write down on paper that if you are wrong, firstly, you will give away all your money and, secondly, you will commit suicide.
Suddenly, they don't want to do it. I say: but you were sure! They start talking nonsense and I think you can see why. If I ask something that you were absolutely sure of, then you say, βOkay, okay, maybe I'm not 100% sure.β
You are familiar with a number of religious sects who think the end is near. They sell all their possessions and go to the mountains, and the world continues to exist, they come back and start all over again. This has happened many times and several times in my lifetime. The various groups that did this were convinced that the world was coming to an end and this did not happen. I try to convince you that absolute knowledge does not exist.
Let's take a closer look at what science does. I told you that, in fact, before you start measuring you need to formulate a theory. Let's see how it works. Some experiments are carried out and some results are obtained. Science attempts to formulate a theory, usually in the form of a formula, that covers these cases. But none of the latest results can guarantee the next one.
In mathematics there is something called mathematical induction, which, if you make a lot of assumptions, allows you to prove that a certain event will always happen. But first you need to accept many different logical and other assumptions. Yes, mathematicians can, in this highly artificial situation, prove the correctness for all natural numbers, but you cannot expect a physicist to also be able to prove that this will always happen. No matter how many times you drop a ball, there is no guarantee that you will know the next physical object you drop better than the last one. If I hold a balloon and release it, it will fly up. But you will immediately have an alibi: βOh, but everything falls except this. And you should make an exception for this item.
Science is full of similar examples. And this is a problem whose boundaries are not easy to define.
Now that we have tried and tested what you know, we are faced with the need to use words to describe. And these words can have meanings different from those with which you give them. Different people can use the same words with different meanings. One way to get rid of such misunderstandings is when you have two people in the laboratory arguing about some subject. Misunderstanding stops them and forces them to more or less clarify what they mean when they talk about various things. Often you may find that they do not mean the same thing.
They argue about different interpretations. The argument then shifts to what this means. After clarifying the meanings of words, you understand each other much better, and you can argue about the meaning - yes, the experiment says one thing if you understand it this way, or the experiment says another if you understand it another way.
But you only understood two words then. Words serve us very poorly.
To be continued ...
Thanks to Artem Nikitin for the translation.
Who wants to help with - write in a personal or email [email protected]
By the way, we have also launched the translation of another cool book - )
We are especially looking for who can help translate system. (we translate for 10 minutes, the first 20 have already been taken)
Book content and translated chapters
- Intro to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (March 28, 1995)
- "Foundations of the Digital (Discrete) Revolution" (March 30, 1995)
- "History of Computers - Hardware" (March 31, 1995)
- "History of Computers - Software" (April 4, 1995)
- "History of Computers - Applications" (April 6, 1995)
- "Artificial Intelligence - Part I" (April 7, 1995)
- "Artificial Intelligence - Part II" (April 11, 1995)
- "Artificial Intelligence III" (April 13, 1995)
- "n-Dimensional Space" (April 14, 1995)
- "Coding Theory - The Representation of Information, Part I" (April 18, 1995)
- "Coding Theory - The Representation of Information, Part II" (April 20, 1995)
- "Error-Correcting Codes" (April 21, 1995)
- "Information Theory" (April 25, 1995) Done, it remains to publish
- "Digital Filters, Part I" (April 27, 1995)
- "Digital Filters, Part II" (April 28, 1995)
- "Digital Filters, Part III" (May 2, 1995)
- "Digital Filters, Part IV" (May 4, 1995)
- "Simulation, Part I" (May 5, 1995)
- "Simulation, Part II" (May 9, 1995)
- "Simulation, Part III" (May 11, 1995)
- Fiber Optics (May 12, 1995)
- "Computer Aided Instruction" (May 16, 1995)
- "Mathematics" (May 18, 1995)
- "Quantum Mechanics" (May 19, 1995)
- "Creativity" (May 23, 1995). Translation:
- "Experts" (May 25, 1995)
- "Unreliable Data" (May 26, 1995)
- Systems Engineering (May 30, 1995)
- "You Get What You Measure" (June 1, 1995)
- (June 2, 1995) translate in 10 minute pieces
- Hamming, "You and Your Research" (June 6, 1995).
Who wants to help with - write in a personal or email [email protected]
Source: habr.com