Click here to check if anything new just came in.
August 01 2010
The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else.
Einstein has said:
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it…. He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience…. The supreme task… is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them…..
Intuitition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.
A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, “But scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the hypotheses.” But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only experimental data.
A lesser mind might then have said, “Well, then man provides the hypotheses.” But Einstein denied this too. “Nobody,” he said, “who has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles.”
Phaedrus’ break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypothesis, was the invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.
At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that “The number of rational hypotheses than can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.” It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits of it.
(Pages 111-112)
There’s more to the discussion here in the book, but I feel like this is enough to get a picture for the kinds of things the author discusses. He explains a few pages later how these thoughts are related to the core issue of objectivism as a way of thinking that has had an ill effect on society. What I liked from this part of the book was how it highlights that not all of science is clear or unambiguous. Not only that but it points in the direction, for me, that it can never be as objective as many people want it to be. It is that tendency of thinking that the author discusses in the book and has had an ill-effect on people’s lives. It can easily lead to rigid thinking such as the creation of sometimes unnecessary and even harmful dichotomies (e.g. work or play, service or work, family or community).
Here’s another part I enjoyed. This part is in the context of a conversation the main character is having with a friend of his. His friend is frustrated at the directions to put together a rotisserie and the main character is explaining to him that the first thing he needs is “peace of mind.” Then, they go into ‘directions’ for putting the device together and how they aren’t simply correct because “they came from the factory.”
[…] “Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course, the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind.
“Actually this ideas isn’t so strange,” I continue. “Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.”
“Sounds like art,” the instructor says.
“Well, it is art,” I say. “This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.”
(page 166-67 - zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance)
sofias
