Lets end the year

with a blog post.

Of course, knowing me, don't expect nice stuff like 'oh this year had been a great year, i resolve to be better next year'. Because I think that's shallow.

Instead, I shall drone about how we, as a human society has failed to understand our purpose. Well, maybe not all of us, but it certainly is apparent in people I come across. And even though my facebook boasts 200 friends (I am an 'average' Malaysian. Imagine that. I thought the average 'friendship' of Malaysians should be like 1000. You people have way too many friends, some that you don't even know anymore), I do come across heaps of people. And we talk.

So yeah, what did I mean by not understanding our purpose?

For starters, many of us don't know why we are doing science. Or that science is fallible in some places. Or what science exactly is.

I might be wrong here, and this is certainly what I believe + my own opinions. They are not in any way.. well.. presented as facts, rather as what I understood from observation and some reading. You get the point I assume.

So what is science? It was an attempt to understand, exploit Nature and at the same time I guess it was also to undermine religious institutions (you know which one) from holding absolute political power and telling people what does not appear to be true.

But science has grown, so much that many people who study and practice science don't know what it is anymore. In the streets I see many claims that 'this is scientifically proven', but nobody questions what it means to be scientifically proven, nor the methods of proving it. And incidentally, most of the time it employs statistics (which apparently is widely misunderstood, even by statisticians so it is claimed).

To illustrate, I take points from an article that I agreed with (no I won't link it here. Its long boring and you won't read it anyway).

Few tests that deal with real living subjects have no effect. Few, in fact almost virtually none. The method of statistically proving, or rather disproving stuff relies heavily on what is known as a null hypothesis. Since the testing methods are limited and heavily influenced (eg hard to control the variables) , the usual step is to set up a null hypothesis.

Lets say 'Eating Grass will not make you look prettier'. And you get a sufficiently large group of volunteers, say 100 people. Their looks you have managed to quantify (somehow), and you have a reasonably controlled environment. For simple arguments sake, everything is good for your test. Except your results.

Now, living beings being living beings, we are dynamic. So the expected results will be a scatter, since that is the point in the beginning, you want to know the distribution. And you do get one, you analyse it. You get a spread. Some people do get prettier, some people get uglier, but most people are unaffected (or significantly affected). But overall, the bulk of the data gives you a, say 98% probability that the effect is give or take 3 unit of prettiness. You would perhaps confidently announce there is no 'significant effect' from eating grass.

I draw the distinction between 'significant effect' and 'not make you look prettier'. One absolutely states that it will have no effect on your looks, and that is the hypothesis. But your data indicates there ARE changes, good or bad or too little to bother with, and they balance out nicely to tell you 'no significant effect'. So, while you may say it is proven statistically, somewhere out there 1 out of 100 people will get prettier if only they would eat grass. And you told them it won't.

I wonder if I made it simple enough, and I don't know if eating grass will make you prettier.

And, second point being that, a few younger people I came across recently profess interest in science. But when I ask them 'why', I get generic answers. 'Career'. 'Interest'.

What irks me is they are interested in something they don't really know what is going on about. I don't know how to put it in words (really honestly), but sometimes I question whether they truly understand what science is for and why.

Lets step back a bit and allow me to explain something a little bit out of place, but I hope to use this to explain the position of science from my perspective.

We humans have two ultimate goals. One is to survive, and another is to understand. The price of developing intelligence is that we are too aware. We question our existence. We are curious, and incidentally insecure.

That is why over time we began the practice of worship (I can be entirely wrong here. This is pure reasoning on my part, not even scientific or religious). We want to feel we have something to pursue for. God became the ultimate idea (I am agnostic by the way, but I guess I would change soon, after a bit more thinking. Not to mainstream though).

Hence, philosophy came in. And boyy, did they come in huge. I don't know when philosophy 'began', but from the Western side it probably started with them Greeks. But hey, that is not in the strict sense, since if we are capable of thought and questioning from way back, then philosophy should probably arise when such capabilities arise.

Many schools form, Socratic Platonic Tectonic you name it.

And one of them appeared in somewhat modern human age. That is science, the philosophy of causality. Everything that happens has a cause, and an associated effect. I think we can even attribute this to the Greeks. That's how far back it went, though not formally called science until much later.

So what is science about? Classical science employs empiricism. You observe something, you infer a cause and you test it under controlled conditions. I think it was called similitude, simulating nature in a lab. It has been successful so far, since many things in our macro world are reproducible. A ball that you throw upwards will always fall down, due to gravity. That is highly reproducible, and not once has it failed to fall down (the ball I mean).

Thus far, it has certainly served us well. Such simple ideas behind it. Understanding the cause and the effect brings about huge effects (hah!). We build factories and stuff based on this. Processes, machines, you name it. All products of science, which is a child of philosophy (I like to think of science as a child of philosophy).

But today, science has grown. We not only observe and take note, we predict. With almost absolute certainty, I can tell you any ball you throw upwards will fall down towards the earth.

...  but of course you could launch it with such great force that it breaks free of the gravity field. I am wrong there then.

But you get what I mean, we can predict stuff. Ah hey, but we not only can predict stuff, based on these information we now can put forward new theories/ideas/models based on old ones. And these are mostly borderline metaphysics.

The atomic theory comes to mind. Funny how no one disputes atoms around me, but many people out there apparently do not believe in atoms simply because it hasn't been seen (oh but it has been seen. They have managed to scan their shapes out). Quantum theory gives us a whole list of subatomic particles (I can devote an entire year to writing blog posts about them, not to say I understand a whole lot there. Just to show how much you can say about it), and string theory predicts even freakier stuff. Thing is, not one of them can be experimented on for now. They fit into models very nicely, and whatever indirect observations that can be made seem to conform to it.

Bearing in mind that we cannot know anything absolute, these are the powers of science that allow us to understand, or at least seem to understand nature. (I want to complain that we do not ascribe laws to Nature. We propose Laws or Models that describe Nature, not the other way around! Realize that! Many people don't, surprisingly).

Stephen Hawking miffed me when he proudly announced that philosophy is coming to an end. Because they, using physics and their results are able to describe Creation itself. I find that somewhat disconcerting, and for lack of a better word, arrogant. Socrates will have a field day with Mr Hawking there.

So look, science is philosophy in action. It is applied, and it has changed our lives so much. It made survival easy for many of us that the only problem you have is your love life and you want to kill yourself because of it. Good way to clear the gene pool of stupidity I say.

Lets summarize what I have written. Science is a branch of philosophy that deals explicitly with reality, in the way that we interact with Nature and observe its behaviour. And we have expanded it to be capable of (certain, reasonable) predictions and even propose models for behaviors of Nature that cannot be experimented upon. Did I miss anything? I hope not, its 2011 and I am tired.

Now if I can just get more people to appreciate what they are doing and why, that we may fulfill the 2nd purpose better.

P/S : Will we someday reach a pinnacle of knowledge and wisdom that we have but one Law that can describe Nature in its entirety? One Law that will be able to explain everything from existence down to every single process, why there are energy, why there is matter etc. And perhaps One Mathematical (if maths survive the advancements.) equation that will allow us to calculate everything from your body temperature to the exact date and time the sun will blow up in your face to the total number of galaxies in existence. All in one.

That would be nice, but it remains unclear if science will give that to us, because the part of being unable to experiment is, well, not so 'scientific' in some sense.

That said, I hope I covered my grounds properly (I always write without drafting or editing. Pardon my errors). Happy New Year