The Boon of Self-Acknowledged Scientific Ignorance

Fascinating, in a Vulcan Way

When science is enthroned as "master of the universe" it becomes harmful, dangerous, and eventually evil.  Like all idols, it becomes unfit for purpose and consequently does a great deal of harm.  Enthroned science becomes state enforced and state subsidized science.  In fact, such science becomes nothing other than a pretext for forging political ends.  Science ceases to be science and morphs into a propaganda tool.


We have seen plenty of this in the last fifty years, culminating in the great global warming rort.  But hard science remains at all times acutely aware of what it does not know.  Agnosticism and scepticism are always the hallmarks of reputable and reliable science. 


Zen Tiger puts it this way: 

whilst I take AGW with a grain of carbon dioxide, I remain convinced that it's not the science of AGW we need to worry about, it's the political response to it. It's common sense to act in a sustainable manner, so I'm not averse to looking after the environment, but it seems to me that the AGW gig is attracting dangerous utopian solutions and fraudulent opportunists alike, each with agenda far removed from pragmatic action let alone a science-based quest for truth and understanding.

Genuine hard science (as opposed to "master-of-the-universe" propagandist science) tends to be non-triumphalistic, tentative and humble.  This has become even more so since the development of quantum mechanics.  Living with "it works, but we have no idea why" tends to keep one's feet on the ground.

A recent article in Prospect magazine reviewed the current state-of-play in quantum physics.  For most of the twentieth century the building blocks of matter have remained an enigma wrapped in a riddle.  But the paradoxical issues were put to one side because the theory of quantum mechanics was so effective in making predictions and shedding lots of light upon the material structures of our world. 

Quantum mechanics is more than a hundred years old, but we still don’t understand it. . . . In 1900 the German physicist Max Planck suggested that light—a form of electromagnetic waves—consists of tiny, indivisible packets of energy. These particles, called photons, are the “quanta” of light. Five years later Albert Einstein showed how this quantum hypothesis explained the way light kicks electrons out of metals—the photoelectric effect. It was for this, not the theory of relativity, that he won his Nobel prize.

The early pioneers of quantum theory quickly discovered that the seemingly innocuous idea that energy is grainy has bizarre implications. Objects can be in many places at once. Particles behave like waves and vice versa. The act of witnessing an event alters it. Perhaps the quantum world is constantly branching into multiple universes.

Now, an interesting thing is that as long as you acknowledge what you do not know, quantum mechanics has proved to be a very useful and productive theory.

As long as you just accept these paradoxes, quantum theory works fine. Scientists routinely adopt the approach memorably described by Cornell physicist David Mermin, as “shut up and calculate.” They use quantum mechanics to calculate everything from the strength of metal alloys to the shapes of molecules. Routine application of the theory underpins the miniaturisation of electronics, medical MRI imaging and the development of solar cells, to name just a few burgeoning technologies.

Quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable theories in science: its prediction of how light interacts with matter is accurate to the eighth decimal place. But the question of how to interpret the theory—what it tells us about the physical universe—was never resolved by founders such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Famously, Einstein himself was unhappy about how quantum theory leaves so much to chance: it pronounces only on the relative probabilities of how the world is arranged, not on how things fundamentally are.

One fundamental problem is that the quantum behaviour of the microscopic and sub-atomic world is not the way the macro world behaves.  Fascinating, as Spock would say.  What is apparent is that the material world is far, far more complex than first appeared.  Mind-bendingly complex.  Science as hand-maiden will accept and celebrate this reality.  Science as triumphalistic master-of-the-universe never will.  It will ever devolve into superstitious pseudo-science useful as leverage for those who lust for control and power.