Some words on science...

Recently, I've been re-reading Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. I read it first about 20 years ago, and I'm fascinated by what a difference those years make.  It's not as though this thought of mine is original, of course.  Once upon a time—about 2500 years ago—there lived a man named Heraclitus of Ephesus who said, “You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you.”  Just because we know the idea isn’t new, though, doesn’t detract from the frisson I felt yesterday.  The effect this book had on me as an undergraduate—studying English literature at the time—was electrifying.  In some ways—perhaps romanticizing my own life (a bit)—this book is why I moved from English to Math for my graduate studies.  Yesterday, I received a different kind of inspiration, though.  As I read the second chapter, REVOLUTION, it gave me heart.  Again romanticizing (a bit), I hope I’m in Tolstoy’s camp. 

Of course, I'm at the same time reminded of a quote from Carl Sagan: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."  So, while I take heart I will also try not to take myself too seriously.

All that by way of prologue, I’d like to share the following from Chaos…

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The historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn describes a disturbing experiment conducted by a pair of psychologists in the 1940s. Subjects were given glimpses of playing cards, one at a time, and asked to name them. There was a trick, of course. A few of the cards were freakish: for example, a red six of spades or a black queen of diamonds.

At high speed the subjects sailed smoothly along. Nothing could have been simpler. They didn't see the anomalies at all. Shown a red six of spades, they would sing out either "six of hearts" or "six of spades." But when the cards were displayed for longer intervals, the subjects started to hesitate. They became aware of a problem but were not sure quite what it was. A subject might say that he had seen something odd, like a red border around a I black heart.

Eventually, as the pace was slowed even more, most subjects would catch on. They would see the wrong cards and make the mental shift necessary to play the game without error. Not everyone, though. A few suffered a sense of disorientation that brought real pain. "I can't make that suit out, whatever it is," said one. "It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart. I'm not even sure what a spade looks like. My God!"

Professional scientists, given brief, uncertain glimpses of nature's workings, are no less vulnerable to anguish and confusion when they come face to face with incongruity. And incongruity, when it changes the way a scientist sees, makes possible the most important advances. So Kuhn argues, and so the story of chaos suggests.

Kuhn's notions of how scientists work and how revolutions occur drew as much hostility as admiration when he first published them, in 1962, and the controversy has never ended. He pushed a sharp needle into the traditional view that science progresses by the accretion of knowledge, each discovery adding to the last, and that new theories emerge when new experimental facts require them. He deflated the view of science as an orderly process of asking questions and finding their answers. He emphasized a contrast between the bulk of what scientists do, working on legitimate, well-understood problems within their disciplines, and the exceptional, unorthodox work that creates revolutions. Not by accident, he made scientists seem less than perfect rationalists.

In Kuhn's scheme, normal science consists largely of mopping-up operations. Experimentalists carry out modified versions of experiments that have been carried out many times before. Theorists add a brick here, reshape a cornice there, in a wall of theory. It could hardly be otherwise. If all scientists had to begin from the beginning, questioning fundamental assumptions, they would be hard pressed to reach the level of technical sophistication necessary to do useful work. In Benjamin Franklin's time, the handful of scientists trying to understand electricity could choose their own first principles—indeed, had to. One researcher might consider attraction to be the most important electrical effect, thinking of electricity as a sort of "effluvium" emanating from substances. Another might think of electricity as a fluid, conveyed by conducting material. These scientists could speak almost as easily to laymen as to each other, because they had not yet reached a stage where they could take for granted a common, specialized language for the phenomena they were studying. By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.

Central to Kuhn's ideas is the vision of normal science as solving problems, the kinds of problems that students learn the time they open their textbooks. Such problems define an accepted style of achievement that carries most scientists through graduate school, through their thesis work, and through the writing a of journal articles that makes up the body of academic careers. "Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition," Kuhn wrote.

Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has an interdisciplinary character—its central discoveries often come from people straying outside the normal bounds of their specialties. The problems that obsess these theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of inquiry. Thesis proposals are turned down or articles are refused publication. The theorists themselves are not sure whether they would recognize an answer if they saw one. They accept risk to their careers. A few freethinkers working alone, unable to explain where they are heading, afraid even to tell their colleagues what they are doing—that romantic image lies at the heart of Kuhn's scheme, and it has occurred in real life, time and time again, in the exploration of chaos.

Every scientist who turned to chaos early had a story to tell of discouragement or open hostility. Graduate students were warned that their careers could be jeopardized if they wrote theses in an untested discipline, in which their advisors had no expertise. A particle physicist, hearing about this new mathematics, might begin playing with it on his own, thinking it was a beautiful thing, both beautiful and hard—but would feel that he could never tell his colleagues about it. Older professors felt they were suffering a kind of midlife crisis, gambling on a line of research that many colleagues were likely to misunderstand or resent. But they also felt an intellectual excitement that comes with the truly new. Even outsiders felt it, those who were attuned to it. To Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study, the news of chaos came "like an electric shock" in the 1970s. Others felt that for the first time in their professional lives they were witnessing a true paradigm shift, a transformation in a way of thinking.

Those who recognized chaos in the early days agonized over how to shape their thoughts and findings into publishable form. Work fell between disciplines—for example, too abstract for physicists yet too experimental for mathematicians. To some the difficulty of communicating the new ideas and the ferocious resistance from traditional quarters showed how revolutionary the new science was. Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. A physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Joseph Ford, started quoting Tolstoy: "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."