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 and Scientific Truth

Earlier I said that experiments involve careful observation of nature, trying to see it very accurately, with the overall hope of learning something new and surprising. I also emphasized the fact that nature is external to oneself and not totally under one's own power. Therefore it may seem incongruous that physicists seek experiments that can be repeated at will, under total control.

On one level there is no contradiction: we create experiments that can be repeated - however the first time we run the experiment we are in suspense about what will actually be observed. The certainty and repeatability is in our preparation of the experiment; the surprise is in the experiment's actual outcome, the details or whole of which may be different than expected.

The point of having totally repeatable control over an experiment is that the experiment's outcome should be exactly the same every time it is performed. Once an experiment is done once, the surprises should be over, and further repetitions of the experiment only serve to verify the scientific truth of the original result. In fact the only "truth" that physicists care to recognize while acting as physicists is those observations that can be repeated experimentally, as well as any mathematical techniques whose predictions have been repeatedly checked experimentally. If you repeat an experiment and obtain a different result than what was originally found, this casts doubt on whether the original result actually was "scientific truth."

For instance, the failure by many to reproduce cold fusion is said to have "discredited" the original experiment which observed cold fusion, leading most physicists to think that probably cold fusion did not occur even in the original experiment. Of course it is possible that fusion actually occurred the first time but not other times - but even if this were true it would not be a "scientific truth," simply because it can not be reproduced on demand by everyone. The only ways to establish the truth or falsity of this possibility would be similar to the procedures used when investigating and judging a crime - collection of historical evidence about the equipment that was used in the first cold fusion experiment and the data that was obtained, rethinking how to interpret all that was observed, judgments about the trustworthiness of the scientists, etc. There may also be reasoning based on currently accepted ideas of how the universe works, and efforts to establish whether or not these ideas indicate any possible way that fusion might have happened in the first cold fusion experiment. In any case, the result of this sort of process would not be "scientific truth," simply because it would be confining itself to a particular time, place, and set of scientists and observations. Physics does not deny the the possibility of truths of a particular, non-repeatable nature - the shape of a particular rock, the sound of a specific person's voice, etc. - but neither does it pay much attention to these things.

Experimental verification part II - Running Into Walls

I am reminded of episodes of Star Trek (I'm most familiar with its first incarnation) where it seemed like in every episode our intrepid explorers encountered an entirely new physical phenomenon. Gazing at his instruments and the starship's view screen, Spock says "Fascinating, Captain! A being of pure energy!" A minute later they begin conversing with the being. This is not faithful to human nature. When we encounter a physical phenomenon which we had not imagined before hand, as a rule we don't even notice it. We presume things are exactly the way we imagined them, and the only uncertainties are the ones we've already thought of. The process of noticing something is different than we imagine it to be requires not minutes but centuries - and the main way that it occurs is by us collectively running our heads into a brick wall many many times until our stubborness releases its clutch for a minute and our minds begin to bend around the newly perceived fact. Humans are not good at being surprised.

Long before the advent of physics many people including philosophers spent lifetimes and many manuscripts reasoning about the physical world and how it must be, developing elegant accounts of motion and inertia, heat and cold, germination and death, the stars and planets. These were smart people and after millenia their reasoning about politics, geometry, math, engineering, architecture, art, literature, and logic continues to be a foundation stone for the human race. However their reasoning didn't do so well when applied to the physical world around us, and after the advent of natural philosophy - physics - their ideas about motion and inertia, heat and cold, etc., have been swept away.

One key to natural philosophy's success was, I believe, that natural philosophers started to try to deliberately force their ideas and themselves into collision with nature. It was as if they realized that the only way to get through human thick-headedness was to have head first collisions with facts, and therefore decided to have as many collisions as possible. Natural philosophers deliberately construct situations where they have a very clear and precise idea of what nature will do, and then check that nature actually does what they expect. The human spirit - individually and collectively - wants to be right in these situations, and to obtain confirmations of one's rightness, and has a hard time recognizing evidence to the contrary. This is really the opposite of scientific progress, which is the process of getting one's wrong-ness smashed into one's intellect until one surrenders to the facts of what one is actually observing. Therefore natural philosophers spend a lot of time and effort - whole careers - trying to outwit their own hunger for rightness. This process is called experiments, or the experimental method. The main idea is to force yourself to actually see what is in front of your eyes, to really observe nature. You make a detailed plan of exactly what parts and chemicals etc. will be used, how they will be put together, and all of this gets written very carefully in a lab notebook. You also think out very meticulously what you expect to see, touch, smell, and why you expect it. You make sure to think of and write out as many details as possible - you are not interested in just one number, but in the entire apparatus, everything you will see not just one detail. If you are not attentive to every detail of what you observe then you can not be a good scientist. Then you actually do the experimental procedure, and keep careful records of everything. Later you compare your records of what you actually observed with your records of what you originally expected - you do this comparison in the spirit of an accountant, sweating over every missing penny. There is a theoretical possibility that you the individual researcher may notice something that clearly teaches you something new about the real world, if you're lucky. But much more likely the things she notices seem to to be matters of refining and perfecting her technique, of needing to think things out more clearly the second time, third time, thousandth time. The real learning occurs as many scientists run headfirst at the same wall over and over again, comparing notes as they go, perfecting their technique, and argueing their reasoning out with each other, until finally the group as a whole begins to catch on to a way they might be wrong, and to develop a feel for the real surprise in what they are observing.