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Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

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Thursday, January 8, 2004
01:28 - Material Science

(top) link
Steven Den Beste is in the middle of a series of long essays regarding the nature of philosophical thought, of both the idealist and the realist varieties. As it happens, by coincidence, I'm in the middle of reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything-- a fairly lightweight tome on the technical details of cosmology and quantum theory and such, but one that does a pretty good job of covering all the bases... and a better one still at tying them all together in a coherent narrative with fascinating historical relevance. (I hadn't known anything, for example, about Sir Humphry Davy and his early-1800s work in identifying many key elements-- including alumium, to whose name he added an extra n four years after discovering it, which American scientists adopted readily-- but the Brits later decided they didn't like the word and added another i to the name. So take that, aluminium proponents!)

What's interesting, though, is the characterization in Den Beste's analyses of science as (at least in part) a realist's game. Engineers naturally get to be the most realistic ones of all, since by definition the things they propose have to be put into practice. But scientists are just engineers who work on paper, and should therefore think more or less like engineers do, right?

Bryson's book reminds me that no, science can easily be seen as just as arcane and idealistic as any of the "intellectual" disciplines so readily mocked in Den Beste's examples. After all, the history of modern science-- from Copernicus onward-- is a long tale of the battle between idealistic contemplations on the nature of the Universe, and the occasional realistic glimpses into the actual nature that our most gifted minds give us from time to time. We all wanted to believe in the model of the atom with three little electrons zipping around the nucleus in neat circular orbits, right? It's only grudgingly that we attempt to wrap our minds around things like wave/particle duality and p-orbitals and "spin". We wish the Universe would resolve itself into neat and elegant laws that we can understand in simple terms that relate to each other without our having to develop new vocabulary; but that seems not to be our destiny. (Even Einstein couldn't unify macro-scale and quantum-scale physics, obsess over it though he did for decades.) On only some occasions do we get to see something as conceptually elegant-- in the engineering sense-- as the periodic table of the elements. Such solutions are rare. For much else of the time, theoretical physics consists of so much hand-waving and refusal to think too hard about any given problem.

On the Standard Model of subatomic particles:

It is all, as you can see, just a little unwieldy, but it is the simplest model that can explain all that happens in the world of particles. Most particle physicists feel, as Leon Lederman remarked in a 1985 PBS documentary, that the Standard Model lacks elegance and simplicity. "It is too complicated. It has too many arbitrary parameters," Lederman said. "We don't really see the creator twiddling twenty knobs to set twenty parameters to create the universe as we know it." Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness-- or as Lederman put it: "There is a deep feeling that the picture is not beautiful."

And a page later, after describing a treatise by the estimable Michio Kaku on superstring theory:

Matters in physics have now reached such a pitch that, as Paul Davies noted in Nature, it is "almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot."

Precisely the ideological conflict that Den Beste has been talking about.

I can think wryly about the cynically satirical intro to Science Made Stupid: science, it claims, is "a way to obtain fat government grants" and "a way of baffling the uninitiated with incomprehensible jargon".

Surely I take natural exception to these characterizations, since after all this is the area in which my own education lies. But I can't help but think that there's some truth to it. I know why I ended up leaning toward an engineering degree rather than a theoretical physics degree. See, in the middle of your freshman year, each Caltech student is supposed to choose between "practical track" and "analytical track" (or prac and anal, as we liked to call them); these tracks led us into engineering/applied physics and theoretical physics, respectively. It was very difficult, once that decision was made, for a student to jump from one track to the other, and more so as time went on. (I never regretted my choosing prac track, for the record. It meant not getting to study with the likes of Kip Thorne, but you can't have everything. Where would you put it?)

And now that I look back on it, where for all the tedium of the frustrating lab work we had to do (this classic gem being a prime example, albeit from another campus) I could just as easily have been sitting in deep leather chairs in old vaulted libraries postulating about whether, as Dennis Overbye said, an electron can be said to exist before you observe it-- a very solipsistic view of the Universe, if you ask me-- I'm just as happy with where I ended up, thanks.

From the Rutherford atom to the "ether" to the geocentric Universe, science has had a very philosophically idealistic history. The past century has seen science become more and more accessible as we learn more and more of its secrets, and more and more of its formerly incomprehensible jargon has become part of our daily discourse. (At MacWorld today, I pointed at the "pitch bend" knob on one of the M-Audio keyboards on display, and said, "Hey, pitch bend-- isn't that what the Curies discovered uranium in?" And the Apple employee on duty guffawed heartily, and then sheepishly confessed that he found it really disturbing that he'd gotten it.)

But there's always the danger of science veering off into the ineffable again. I'm a little worried that we're on the verge of the same thing happening. Den Beste quotes C.P. Snow thus:

Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others. There is no canon or accredited list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

Some will, sure. I don't doubt that things like neural nets and nanotech will become engineering problems, and therefore relevant to everyday life through natural product evolution. But what about stuff like string theory and the inflationary Universe and such? We learn the basics of these on the Science channel, but they aren't as relevant to our lives as the atom bomb was. Nor are they likely to be. Things are branching out, growing more byzantine. With the tendency toward the esoteric and abstract comes the tendency toward anal-track jargon.

Why all this musing? Do I disagree with Den Beste or with Snow? Nah. I just wanted to get a few thoughts down on paper, since the serendipity of all these things crossing my field of vision at once just seemed too interesting not to comment on. And much as I'd like for science to be as divorced as possible from disciplines that talk about "deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not 'narrative'," I have to say with some disappointment that I don't think it's as far from that pole as it could be.

Long Live the Engineers.

UPDATE and random thought: Many people seem to be under the erroneous assumption that engineers love saying it depends, because we say it so much. Really, we don't. But we recognize that it's the only way to give a correct answer to most technical questions. We'd love it if we could explain things in simpler terms, but most often we just can't if we're trying to be accurate. Engineers vastly prefer correct answers over pleasing answers. It's when an answer is both correct and pleasing that we like it the best-- that's what elegance is.


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