Control Over Experiments - Getting the Whole Picture

In previous blogs I discussed how physicists choose a role or social contract in which they are cast as specialists and professors, not as power brokers or politicians. The last blog argued that this casting choice is a way of cementing and deepening power, both because it gives scientists a special status and realm of control like that of priests in the temples of progress, and because it frees them from the obligations that would come from being responsible for the social and moral ramifications of their own work. Now I'll discuss two other ingredients in the power equation.

We have seen that physics strives for the power to make nature do something over and over again on demand according to our whims, and even to take nature apart; nature becomes our slave rather than our partner. Similar levels of control and power can not be obtained over even the most docile people. Consider the power given by a system of pipes and taps providing running water. Such a contrast with the power that would be offered by keeping servants or dedicated workers - they would talk to you as they brought the water, change their pattern slightly or greatly each day, not respond with the same alacrity as a water tap, and sometimes be unavailable, maybe even leave permanently or die. Clearly nature offers far greater opportunities for control and power than people do. A physicist who chooses to focus her energy on nature rather than people is making, from this perspective, a power-maximizing choice. A simple calculation is enough to see that the greatest success in obtaining control via politics and power games will still leave you at sea struggling against new waves; if science-based control is the only kind available, why not cling to this rock? Scientific knowledge can seem like the only certainty, the only lighthouse in an uncertain world; what does a scientist lose by abdicating her role and responsibility for society as a whole? In other words, if the overriding goal is power and control; if this goal is used as the measure of truth as exemplified by physics' emphasis on experimental reproducibility and analysis, then a policy of specialization, technical roles, and abdication of responsibility for society is the only reasonable choice.

Going further, it is fair to say that for many individual physicists (and scientists) science is the way of maximizing their own personal power and security. Whatever Einstein's actual character was, the popular caricature of Einstein as a man who was socially incompetent contains a grain of truth about physicists as group - many of us don't do as well with people as with experiments and equations; it is striking how many of us have poor emotional awareness, empathy, communication, leadership, and group skills. And even more deeply, there can be a lack of trust for people, a sense of alienation, a need for refuge and security. People like this can be found in all walks of life; however if they discover at a young age that they do well with math or machinery, and that not only nature but society rewards their scientific efforts, then science can easily become a holy grail. This powerful incentive results in the physics community having more socially challenged people than is normal in most other professions. What I am saying is that the professor/expert role maximizes power not only for physicists as a group, but also for many individual physicists who are much more comfortable with subservient nature up close and threatening society at arm's reach.

In summary, not only is the scientific method focused on obtaining total control over nature via experiments, but also physicists themselves seek out control and power, both by choosing physics in the first place and by insisting on a particular role in society which is carefully chosen to promote their own status, security, and freedom from social responsibility. One of the hallmarks of natural philosophy is its focus on experimental control. From a certain perspective that has been widely popularized, this looks noble and clear-sighted; one talks "laws of nature," the search for a "theory of everything," etc. But the unspoken truth is that down to its very heart science and the scientific community are alloyed, joined, infected with the search for power and security. The popularized story about science is a true but small part of the picture; from a more human perspective one sees a much larger tapestry, with the scientific community taking its place in the larger human community, and with many threads including responsibility and its absence, respect and disrespect, social contracts, personal talents and weaknesses, etc. As with all human stories, a lot of wisdom (wisdom! not only knowledge!) and love is needed to understand, care for, guide, regulate, and prune the scientific community and its work.

Control Over Experiments - The Scientist's Role vs. Responsibility

Why do physicists prize a role which renounces power or control in the political, economic, or environmental, or social arenas? Certainly the power we physicists have wrested from nature has transformed human affairs in these areas and others, and certainly physics itself is constantly driven from within to obtain more power and control over nature; this is at the center of our mission.

Perhaps what looks on the surface like an abdication of power is actually at the heart a way of obtaining still more power, prestige, and security. Having an esteemed and needed role, and using this role to distinguish and divide themselves from others and their affairs, allows physicists to formalize a social contract with the world at large: society will provide generous funds, liberty, security, and respect, and in return physicists will tend the fountains of progress promising quality of life (power) for all but not asking any questions about how that power will be used. If faith in progress is akin to religion, then physicists might be compared to priests or shamans: people who promise and maybe deliver success and power, but wash their hands of profane things like politics and business, while expecting in return esteem, respect, regular support, and a realm of control.

This social contract between physicists and the larger society allows the two parties to absolve each other of responsibility. As I already sketched, physicists do not take responsibility for the ways that their focus on power has been imitated and continued in the world at large, or even for the moral issues of their own research activities; in other words physicists lay the responsibility with society. But in exchange society often lays the responsibility for its horrors and sins at the doors of science. This can transfer of responsibility can take one of two tracks; the "pessimistic" track attributes our ills to science and technology: some of the keywords are "nuclear", "genetically modified," "organic," "free radicals," "virus," "radiation," "chemical," and "pesticide," but there are many more suspicions ranging from the widely accepted to the fringe. Many of my Italian friends are still convinced that microwave ovens can cause cancer. While the attitude can be one of thoughtful discernment, at times the feeling is more one of terror about particular keywords and of blaming science for the world's problems and for life's insecurities, for instance the various ways we could die. While I believe that the scientific community should take responsibility for the moral weight of its actions, my expectation is that culpability will not center around mysterious technological keywords but instead around issues understandable to everyone like abuse of power and lack of respect.

There is another more "optimistic" way that society transfers the responsibility for its sin and failures onto science: faith in progress. If nuclear materials threaten to poison our world, we rely on our scientists to sooner or later provide a safe disposal technology. If we have poisoned our earth and water and stripped mined our land into lunar landscapes, then some day reprocessing and cleansing technologies will restore them. If the disenfranchised turn to terrorism or illegal migration, our scientists will develop new security technologies and smart bombs. If millions die yearly from wars, malnutrition, malaria, and political difficulties, then we will perfect the science of globalization. If we have an epidemic of obesity or AIDS, then we put people to work on new drugs, surgeries, exercise machines, prophylactics, immunizations, selective abortions, psychiatric and psychological techniques, mass media campaigns, and gene therapies. We can do no wrong as long as we continue giving money to scientists, because the scientists are sure to find a way to right all our wrongs. The "temporary" problems along the way are just the price of progress.

As a particular example, with the modern concern about global warming some people are popularizing the concept of the "carbon footprint," which means that your personal contribution to emission of carbon into the atmosphere. Along with this concept there is an organization which will allow you to pay them instead of reducing your footprint. If you go on an extra flight, that's OK: just give them a little bit more of your money. They promise to use your money to make a compensating reduction in the world's carbon emissions, perhaps by reducing someone else's footprint, or else by investing in technology that sooner or later will reduce emissions. This practice is identical to religious practices of sacrifice and atonement. People take what is precious to them: grain, cattle, money, clothing, in fact anything of value, and give the goods over to priests to either destroy or else devote them for sacred causes. In return for their sacrifices the people lose responsibility for their evils and are promised healing, success, and prosperity. Only two things have changed: (a) we have some new "sins" like pollution and the carbon footprint, and (b) now our priests are called scientists, experts, environmental advocates, etc. The substance is still the same: we give them our money, they give us freedom from any moral qualms about our actions and also a promise of prosperity.

The specific role that physicists cast themselves in allows them to confer moral responsibility to society, and in turn society transfers back its responsibility through faith in progress or else demonization of specific scientific keywords. In this exchange everyone is freed from responsibility, from qualms of conscience - which is another plus for the power seeker. Perhaps one of the greatest benefits which physicists derive from the role they cling to is precisely the way that it frees them to research what they like without moral or human considerations.

Control Over Experiments - Reaffirming the Value of Physics

I think it is clear that natural philosophy, physics, experiments, and science in general have their value. It is good to learn about nature, to understand it, even just to admire it - and we certain see nature with more detail and precision, and understand it better, than we did four centuries ago. Experiments and emphasis on reproducible scientific knowledge have made important contributions to the human race. Our possibilities individually and as a race have been considerably altered through the mass production of various technological devices, and natural philosophy is certainly one of the springs feeding the technological river.

Control Over Experiments - Respect For Nature?

Physicists are saying to nature "Surprise me, tell me something more about yourself, but do it while following these rules." (If you were asked for the same question, how much would you tell?) And the surprise that nature gives us, the gift of new knowledge - it then becomes "ours," and gives us new power over nature. At least one writer compares scientific experiment to "putting nature on the rack" to force her to divulge her secrets. It is possible to pursue the scientific endeavour in a way that really respects and treasures the nature that is being studied, but for many researchers the attitude has been more a pursuit of dominance, an effort to conquer nature and bend her to our will. If the truth be told all too many individual scientists, like so many other hard workers in today's competitive economy, are obsessed with their own personal success, and nature is their tool for getting there. This tendency is magnified by the current alignment between the scientific community and the power centers of government, business, consumer markets, and military machines.

If there is an analogy between love and the experimentalist's attentive observation of the world (as I claimed earlier in this blog), this analogy has its limits, because all too often the end result has been something that looks a lot more like rape than like peaceful harmony. In the small it looks like plastic wrappers in the trash and children and old people alike wasting away in front of TVs; in the large it looks like a planet whose species are devastated, whose hidden treasures are excavated, pumped, and burned, and whose peoples destroy and enslave each other with the most advanced technologies.

Is this tendency for science to result in the abuse of persons and of the environment something external to physics (as many scientists would like to think) or built into physics from its very foundations?

Control Over Experiments - How It Restricts Physics' Vision

So at one level there is no conflict between a physicist's emphasis on repeatable experiments and her interest in being surprised, proved wrong, and forced to learn something new. But this conflict is resolved only at the expense of a restriction of the scientific field of vision, confining one's attention to those things that one can make happen over and over again, at will - i.e. things that are under one's own control. And the fact is that most matters of interest, and those of greatest interest, are not repeatable at all, and would be destroyed by efforts to control them in the way demanded by natural philosophy. Foremost are of course people - each person on this planet is unrepeatable, with his or her own innate dignity, personality, history, will, and feelings. There is no question of repeating a person's intrinsic being, history, or choices, even considering issues of identical twins and cloning. Attempts to control or repeat a person's choices and personality, whether to obtain scientific reproducibility or for any other reason, would be essentially disrespectful and immoral, and if successful would destroy the person in question. Clearly "scientific truth" is very small (not insignificant, just small) compared to the total of what is important and true. For instance, the questions of whether Alison Hinckley down the street is happy, the success of her marriage, her love or neglect of her parents, how she deals with suffering and death of others and in her own life - none of these are the province of scientific truth. Yet these are things of real import.

Control Over Experiments - Hard Sciences vs. Soft Science

It is precisely this repeatability by anybody, at any time, as many times as desired, and under perfect control, that physicists prize in their experiments and consider to be the hallmark of "scientific truth." Conversely, if something does not meet these standards, then we refuse to think about it or discuss it, at least not as physics per se. We leave these questions to other disciplines, and we uses the words "hard" vs. "soft" to describe how well a discipline conforms to the scientific ideals of repeatability and control, with physics on the "hard" end of the spectrum. ("Hard" vs. "soft" has nothing to do with how difficult the fields actually are.) For instance, astronomy has the problem that the stars are not under our control and we can not make them repeat their behavior; however if ten astronomers look at the same star at ten different times they will almost certainly see the same thing, which is a sort of repeatability. There is also a statistical repeatability in astronomy: picking a thousand stars at random, you always find roughly the same number of red giants, white dwarfs, Sun-type stars, etc. So astronomy is not as "hard" a science as physics; we can also say that it is a "softer" science than physics, which means the same thing. Going softer, one can speak of sociology, the study of large groups of people. From a scientific point of view this is worse: not only are world's people out of the scientist's control, but their actions, demographics, characteristics, opinions, etc. change from year to year and even day to day. The only sort of repeatability a sociologist can hope for is by running two or more similar measurements/surveys/censuses at roughly the same time. Softer yet would be psychology/psychiatry, where one finds a few things which recur, like the addict's acquired physical dependence on drugs, or oedipal complexes, but these recurring elements occur in a multitude of variations unique to each subject and constitute only a small portion of the overall field of study.

Then there are many fields which are not properly science at all. Most of these have their roots decidedly outside of philosophy, and emphasize the practical or functional side of things: law, engineering, the arts, history, accounting, etc. These are often called professions. However there are at least three disciplines which are rooted in philosophy and therefore are not in the same class as the practical professions, but are not science either. One is philosophy itself, which has parted ways from natural philosophy by steering away from experiment. Another discipline is theology, which is rooted in philosophy and does emphasize very careful attention and thought about the world around us, but focuses on unrepeatable aspects of that world, namely persons and what they do, say, and write. If natural philosophy is the philosophy of repeatable things, theology is the philosophy of unrepeatable things, of persons. A third philosophical but non-scientific discipline is mathematics, which concerns certain results which can be reproduced on demand, but which are not part of the physical observable world.

Of course a lot of times there is a secret to repeating something; you have to figure out all the necessary preconditions. Finding out how to make something repeat can be part of hard science. For instance a few years ago someone reported observing a fusion reaction occurring fairly slowly, in smallish laboratory. Previously fusion had been observed only in the sun, thermonuclear bombs, and large experiments involving very large amounts of energy and heat, so the new observation was very exciting. Over the next years many many physicists spent a lot of time trying to make fusion happen in their own labs, using similar equipment. Some report that they found evidence for cold fusion, though their evidence was pretty subtle, the sort that requires very special measurement equipment, quite far from nuclear explosions. However many physicists failed entirely to reproduce cold fusion, and this happened so often that the scientific community as a whole remains sceptical of those who continue to report cold fusion in their labs. So here we see that the question - is cold fusion repeatable on demand? - is a valid question for physics. However as it became clear that many skilled researchers are unable to reproduce the original result, cold fusion moved out of the domain of hard science, and the physics community stopped thinking about it. If someday in the future someone did figure out a recipe for reproducing cold fusion on demand, then suddenly it would become again a physics question.

Control Over Experiments

We started out by introducing philosophy, and then saying that natural philosophy (physics) made a break from other philosophy by emphasizing three things: scientific experiments, control over experiments, and numbers. We have just finished discussing scientific experiments, which involve a real attentive observation of nature and readiness to be both surprised and wrong, which has some similarities to love between people. However the analogy to loving relationships is not complete,: the second major characteristic of natural philosophy (physics) is its emphasis on repeatability and total control.

Natural philosophers restrict their inquiries and do not study a lot of things, saying by definition that many things are just not their problem. This may come as a surprise to many who understand that science gives explanations of everything and considers the whole world as its domain. This is not really true: scientists restrict themselves to studying things that they can repeat at will, things that they can make happen over and over again, and that their colleagues can duplicate. For instance, if I fill a balloon with cold air and then heat it, the balloon will grow bigger. I can repeat this many times with many balloons, and it will never happen that heating the balloon would make it shrink. Moreover my friends, my neighbors, and even you my reader can fill balloons and heat them and observe the same behavior. The balloons are fully under our control: we can keep them at a particular temperature as long as we like, and measure their size, temperature, composition, etc.

Natural Philosophy

Of course natural philosophers - physicists - have the same philosophical bent. As a case in point, consider the efforts to come up with a Theory Of Everything, or a Grand Unified Theory. In those efforts physicists are trying to understand something that is far beyond human experience, with almost no connection to the real world, so that we have to build billion dollar machines if we want to hear even the slightest whisper from nature about these matters. Not practical at all.

But going back to the natural philosophers, you can imagine how it looked at the time when a person asked whether heavy things really fall faster than light things, or debated the commonplace knowledge that vacua can not exist in nature, or claimed that everything is made out of very small invisible indivisible pieces. This last was proposed by the Indians and Greeks but had no connection with real world evidence until two millenia later. These people clearly had an unworldly bent, the sort of attitude that is epitomized in so many pictures of Einstein.

But there was something a bit different about these natural philosophers, which made them far different from other philosophers, and still lies between the two like a canyon. The natural philosophers emphasized numbers, experimental verification of their ideas against nature's actual behavior, and complete control over experiments. I'll expand on all three.