Stewart Brand, founder of the hippie touchstone The Whole Earth Review, gave the following introduction to Kevin Kelly's "SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE":
Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself.
Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society.
A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science...
2000 BC — First text indexes
200 BC — Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
1000 AD — Collaborative encyclopedia
1590 — Controlled experiment (Sir Francis Bacon)
1600 — Laboratory
1609 — Telescopes and microscopes
1650 — Society of experts
1665 — Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
1665 — Scholarly journals
1675 — Peer review
1687 — Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
1920 — Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
1926 — Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
1937 — Controlled placebo
1946 — Computer simulation
1950 — Double blind experiment
1962 — Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)
It's interesting how there are two golden ages in this list: the 17th Century and the mid-20th Century.
Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in science...
4) New ways of knowing will emerge. "Wikiscience" is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating "fast, cheap, & out of control." Negative results will have positive value (there is already a "Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine"). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection--- no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)
Kelly's talk offers many more potential improvements in the methodology of science. Brand concludes:
"Science is the way we surprise God," said Kelly. "That's what we're here for." Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was, in his own way, both a part-time scientist and a deeply religious man, seemed to share this sense of the universe as a divinely-instituted puzzle that we are morally obliged to try to solve through science and art, even though the game might go on on forever.
(Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution).
A reader points out:
"Interesting about scientific developments list. But "1920" for Karl Popper's falsifiability is surely far too early? KP published LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY in 1934. In 1920 he was only 18, and while he might have started world championship philosophizing very young, he didn't start that young!"
Another says:
"Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers..."
No, feedback is the essence of science: it checks itself against reality, adjusts itself, then checks again. Something that doesn't do that, like recursive-mutative theology, perpetually expands in contradictory ways. Force or fashion settles theological arguments; fit with reality settles scientific ones.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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