John Grant Discarded Science (2006)

John Grant Discarded Science (2006) Or Ideas that Seemed Good at the Time. Nicely done historical survey of the development of science, which more often than not, and rather surprisingly when you think about it, turned out to be progress. Two take-aways: a) science, like any other human endeavour, is limited both by the available data and by the climate of ideas; and b) there is a rather wide fuzzy band between science and crackpottery.
     It’s extremely difficult to think outside the box, despite the many gurus who’ve claimed they’ve found fool-proof ways of doing so. We just can’t think thoughts involving facts and concepts we don’t have. Breakthroughs come not so much from brand new concepts as from rearrangements of the old ones. The type example is of course Einstein’s equating of gravity and acceleration, based on nothing more than the observation that the equations of motion can’t tell the difference.
     Sometimes, new concepts are literally unthinkable: we know that photons and other bits behave like both waves and particles, so some people promote the term wavicle to label them, but a label in this case doesn’t help us imagine what they are. Best to go with the current suggestion that wave-like and particle-like behaviour depends on context. How these entities behave depends on what they are interacting with. IOW, context is everything; and the interface (interaction) is the only observable reality. “There is nothing behind or before the mask. There is only the mask”.
     Contemplating the discarded theories that seemed reasonable at the time reminds us how difficult it is to translate even apparently simple ideas into testable hypotheses. It took a heap of very careful experiment to show that fire was not the gain or loss of phlogiston, for example. It also reminds us how limited our present concepts must be. Perhaps we have reached the limits of our ability to make sense of the universe. There’s no a priori reason to assume that we have the capacity to frame the ultimate Theory of Everything. After all, most of us have difficulty even understanding the questions that the physicists pose, let alone get an inkling of a notion of an idea of what the answers mean. Our concepts, even the most esoteric ones, are grounded in our sensory experience of the world around us. We construct an image of that world using sense data, and are pleased to call it true. But the reality is not what we think it is. We cannot in fact think what it is.
     Pseudoscience and other crackpottery comes in for (rather gentle) mockery. The index helps find Grant’s  witty and ironic comments, in case you need a good quote to underline some absurdity.
     Well done, a keeper. ***