20120517

Science

I saw this on NPR:


The logic of science, boiled down to one minute!

A good thing to find on a day of boiling 2-3 years of thinking into a handful of PowerPoint slides. (That's right folks, there's a light at the end of the tunnel! And I can see it!)

I think this pairs well with the Parable of The Tower and The Tree:

The Tree of life represents the actual territory of reality. Each of us builds our own internal Tower, which is a description of that reality. However, the Tower is not the Tree, it is only an artifice which describes the Tree. 
This is what paradigms are like. We build mental constructs to describe reality, but those mental constructs are only as good as our perspective and lucidity and knowledge allow. All it takes is a revolutionary concept or idea with veracity to destroy the Tower. 
The dominant paradigms are a collection of such Towers, each attempting to describe their reality in their field of expertise. Just because these modern Towers have gotten to be enormous behemoths, however, doesn't mean that they are exempt from the evolutionary process. Sooner or later, reality is going to be different enough from the mere description that the descriptions' apparent authority will be destroyed. 
A good scientist welcomes this and a bad scientist fears it. A good scientist looks forward to the destruction of the Tower, because they know that the Tower that will be built in its place based on the new epiphany will be a better Tower. A bad scientist is invested in the paradigm emotionally, and so protects the Tower. He has forgotten that the goal of science is not truth (which is unattainable), but accuracy (which can always be improved upon).
And if you want to read a whole book about it, check out Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Happy science post!