The mystery of too many variables

Standard theory of particle physics

We have now two great physical theories:

·         On one side, quantum mechanics, which applies primarily to very small objects (those scarcely affected by gravity), and is the basic tool for the standard theory of particle physics.

·         On the other, general relativity, which applies to very large objects (from the planets to the whole universe, those for which almost nothing matters except gravity), and is the main tool for the standard cosmological (Big Bang) theory.

Unfortunately, the two theories are not mutually compatible, so that physics is far from having resolved its outstanding issues. Moreover, these two theories depend on about forty independent variables. Many physicists think that they are too many. If it were true, it would mean that the configuration space of nature has about forty dimensions. If it is difficult to imagine a four-dimensional space, what about forty!

The sin of the scientist

Isaac Asimov

In an article published in 1969 with the same title as this one, Isaac Asimov argued that science should be subject to ethical constraints, and analyzed several cases in which a scientific discovery could be considered morally unacceptable. I consider here a few cases, not necessarily the same as those chosen by Asimov, and later will comment on his conclusion.

• The medical experiments with the Jews in concentration camps by Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors, or by the Japanese with their American prisoners. Even in such a blatant case, the perpetrators could find an ethical justification on their deeds, arguing that, as their victims were inferior beings who had no right to life, it was right to use them for experiments that could be beneficial to other human beings that enjoyed that right. It is an unacceptable justification, but they probably used it to silence their conscience.
• The two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. This act of war killed over 200,000 non-combatant civilians. During most of Western history, including the first World War, this would have been considered unacceptable. The justification was that dropping the bombs saved the lives of thousands of soldiers, who would have died if the fighting had been prolonged. Is this enough, or are we again comparing the lives of two groups of human beings, some of which are considered more valuable than others? Anyway, Sergeant Leroy Lehman, who recognized Hiroshima before the release of the bomb, ended his days in a monastery.
• The same argument (that the lives of some human beings are more valuable than those of others) has been used in other circumstances. Sometimes, to increase the strength of the argument, even the human quality of the victims is denied. Some cases are obvious, both in history (slavery) and now (abortion).

First atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo

In his article, Asimov concluded that there are cases where science has led to morally unjustifiable progress, and pointed at the use of poison gases as a war weapon whose sole purpose was killing human beings. It is noteworthy that the author of this discovery (Fritz Haber) was later awarded the Nobel Prize, not for poison gas, of course, but for other important findings in the field of chemistry (a process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen).

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

The end of science

Servers at LAAS
by Guillaume Paumier
Licensed under CC BY 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

In my previous article I wrote this: perhaps our scientific civilization won’t endure beyond this century. This is what I mean by the title of this article (the end of science), rather than the possibility that science is over because it has already discovered everything that can be discovered, which is very unlikely, as I pointed out in another post.

Science has been an integral part of our civilization for centuries, more than is usually believed, for scientific activity was already palpable during the Middle Ages. Isn’t it absurd to predict that such activity can be ended? How might this happen? Here I propose a few, far from exhaustive considerations:

The horizon effect

We are well aware of the horizon effect: as we walk towards the horizon, the horizon gets further away. In science sometimes this effect seems to apply. Let us look at a few examples:

Mycoplasma genitalium genetic map

• Synthetic biology: In 1960, producing living cells in the laboratory was predicted to be feasible by 1970. In 2015, Craig Venter (1) sees it feasible soon, perhaps by 2030. It is true that we have come very far, that great strides have been made, but the ultimate goal seems to be always at the same distance, or even a little further away. Moreover, the origin of life remains a mystery. The simplest being able to live independently (Mycoplasma genitalium) is very complicated, light-years away from the hypothetical first living being.

Surveys and statistics: opinions and facts

Henry Whitehead (1825-1896)

We tend to confuse the majority opinion with the truth. This is wrong, as expressed by Henry Whitehead:

Never fear forming a minority of one; majorities are usually wrong.

But sometimes the consequences drawn from public opinion are even more misleading than the opinion itself. In an article entitled Are we xenophobic? published in a Spanish high-diffusion newspaper on March 17, 2011, the author discussed the result of an official survey:

...Citizens believe that immigrants receive from the state...

lots more (30.8%) or just more (38.7%) than they contribute.

And he drew from this result the following comment:

Any sociological diagnosis would understand these figures
as a breeding ground for a reactionary and xenophobic social culture.
Saying the opposite is tantamount to denying a consistent reality.

Predicting social future: political correctness

2001, A Space Odyssey

As I discussed in a previous post, scientists are often wrong when they predict the future of science. Science fiction writers make mistakes too, especially when they are trying to predict technical advances. Consider the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, which got wrong almost all the developments proposed for that year. Fourteen years after the date in the title, we still don’t have a base on the moon, manned spaceships to Jupiter, artificial intelligence, or humans in hibernation.

We should remember Asimov’s third law of futurics, which states that predicting the social consequences of future scientific progress is more important than accurately predicting that progress. A SF story predicting cars, but not the parking problem, would not have been a good SF story.

In 1941, before Asimov formulated this law, Robert Heinlein correctly applied it in his short story Solution Unsatisfactory, which predicted the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, its use to end World War II and the subsequent nuclear stalemate between the great powers. Not bad, as an example of what you can do in a well-built science fiction story.

Predicting the scientific future

Man likes making predictions about the future. Scientists are human beings, therefore they make predictions about the progress to be expected in various fields of research during the coming years, decades and even centuries. These predictions are widely publicized by the media.

Are scientific predictions more likely to be satisfied than other predictions of the future? We might think so, since science is the most rational branch of human knowledge. What should we do to confirm or disconfirm this surmise? We should apply the scientific method to the predictions, i.e. wait until the scheduled time has come and check whether the predictions were fulfilled or not. Such studies are not usually done. Everyone is prepared to predict or to listen to predictions, but few bother to check if those anticipations actually came to happen.

There are a few egregious cases that many people remember. In 1956, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, where the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, predicted that in less than ten years we would have computer programs capable of beating the world chess champion, or seamlessly translating between any two human languages. The total failure of this prediction is obvious: the first target came true 41 years later rather than 10, while the second has not been achieved after almost 60 years. As a result of this failure, research in artificial intelligence stopped for more than a decade and was not revived until expert systems reawakened interest in the discipline.