Descriptions and explanations

Lavoisier

An example will illustrate the difference between these two concepts:

• Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is considered the father of modern chemistry. His Traité Élémentaire de Chimie revolutionized many of the ideas that until then had dominated this science. However, when it comes to the chemical reactions it describes, this book is a mere catalogue. So we are told something like this:

If we mix oxygen gas and hydrogen gas and apply fire or an electric spark to the mixture, an explosion occurs and the result is water.

This is a description. It tells what happens but offers no explanation of the phenomenon.

John Dalton

• With his atomic theory, John Dalton offered an explanation for Lavoisier's description. This one:

2H₂+O₂→2H₂O

In other words: hydrogen gas consists of molecules made up of two hydrogen atoms bonded together. The same goes for oxygen gas. When reacting, because of the application of fire or an electrical spark, two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen combine, giving rise to two molecules of water, each one of which is formed by two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

In science, explanations are much more important than descriptions. In another post in this blog, I pointed out that science will never be able to explain everything, because there will always be a level that we can only describe, but not explain, and if we ever manage to explain it, it will be at the cost of introducing a new level that we can only describe, but not explain.

In fact, we currently have not just two degrees of scientific knowledge, but four:

1. Explanations, such as the atomic theory with regards to chemical reactions.
2. Descriptions, such as the theory of fundamental particles (quarks and leptons), for which we currently have no explanation, although these descriptions help to explain a different level: the hadrons.
3. Hypotheses, such as the supposed existence of dark matter which, although not experimentally proven, helps to give provisional explanations to measurable observations, such as the rotation of galaxies.
4. Hypothetical lucubrations, which are offered without any justification based on experimentation or observation. This type of speculation is proliferating a lot lately. I will cite, as examples, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the possibility of building strong artificial intelligence, or the various theories of the multiverse.

Richard Dawkins

In a previous post I pointed out that Richard Dawkins, in his debate with John Lennox, said that neither he, nor Lennox, nor anyone else knows anything about scientific issues such as the origin of the universe or the origin of life. Here Dawkins hit the mark, for when scientists say that the universe arose as a spontaneous fluctuation of the vacuum (or a fluctuation of nothing, as some of them say, displaying their ignorance), they are not offering an explanation of the origin of the universe, or a description of what could have happened, not even a hypothesis based on observation, but just a hypothetical lucubration, without any experimental or observational basis, so the scientific value of this statement is equal to zero. It is just an exercise of imagination without scientific basis and without explanatory power. Many scientists cannot distinguish between science and science fiction.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca