Scientists are irreverent

"Richard Hamming compared knowledge to compound interest: The more you know, the more you learn. Hence, progress tends to be exponential.

Some innovations increase our rate of progress slightly. The light bulb allows us to work late at night. Some accelerate progress tremendously. Science is one such innovation.

Alas, there isn’t a universally accepted definition of science. This does not stop us from doing science. Formal definitions are often less important than we think. For example, while most people could not formally define pornography, they can still produce and consume it. When people rent a porno they rarely discover that it is something else entirely. It looks like porno is a robust concept.

I am not convinced that science is so robust. Richard Feynman denounced cargo-cult science. Kevin Kelly reminds us that scientists often behave like politicians: inconvenient truths are buried whereas positive results are exaggerated.

There is clearly no widespread agreement on a formal definition of science. But it seems to me that the most important characteristic of science is that it puts truth ahead of social hierarchies: it does not matter how much anyone likes your theory nor who you are. It does not matter who your opponent is.  What matters are the facts themselves. Accordingly, all great scientists are irreverent starting with Galileo Galilei himself.

In this sense, science represented a remarkable weapon… not because it allowed us to understand thermodynamics or the atom, but because it allowed ideas to compete. Science is a free market of ideas. We saw recently that through a mix of government interventions and too-big-to-fail monopolies, financial markets can collapse and destroy wealth. A free market is a fragile ideal.

But we can measure freedom by looking at how irreverent the players are. How many times do scientist oppose the government and large corporations? How many times do scholars attack famous journals? That doctored results get published is not a concern, but you should be worried if you are thinking twice about denouncing them because the authors are famous.

How well are we doing? In Canada, the government is forbidding scientists from communicating their results. Obviously, some bureaucrats believe that freedom is unimportant in science.

Yet you don’t recognize scientists by their laboratory coats, research grants or prestigious publications. You recognize them by their irreverence. Perhaps we should train all new scientists in how to challenge authority."

Source: Daniel Lemire's blog 

Science and Beauty

Science vs the old world, the world of the unknown. Science, It frees us. Each of us, each individual lives as a result of a series of chain events. We were not destined to live, instead, dispite all odds, we breath, we walk, we love. And everything that is good and beautifull should be understood. Science does not take away the beauty. No! It's only adds. We now know that stars are a spinning ballmade  off methane and helium. Does it takes away it's beauty? It does shine the same way, it makes us dream just the same. But now, we know that it is there, we know what it is, it was not imposed by some bearded man in the sky, it was made by chance. And that, that makes it even more impressive, it makes me dream of all the possibilities, it makes me wonder: how can that be? how does nature work?


"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"


We're no longer constrant by the certanty of living in a limited plane, of dying and going somewhere we're destined to. We have both possibilities and dreams. We can know how the world works, how the animals run, and why. Suddenly, we can see every system unraveling around us. You say something is beautiful, and I agree, but a scientist also aprecciates how marvelous is the life of that being, or the complexity of that system.

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."


Note: All the quotes are Richard Feynman's statements