A few years ago Armand Leroi wrote The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. Some people immediately made a critique that actually, science, as we understand it, is really the creation of early modern Europe. That Aristotle and his fellow Ancients, or physicians and astronomers of early medieval Islam, or the scholastics of the high Middle Ages, didn’t “really” do “science.”
I think most of us understand where this critique is coming from. But, even if you grant the objection if Aristotle was alive today, would he be a scientist? Of course, he would go into science! And, he would probably a good one. Perhaps a great one. Why? Because he had the curiosity, cognitive skills, and, there is a culture that would allow him to flourish. To me, the biggest difference between early modern Western science, as it emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and what came before, is that it was a cultural concert of thinkers, a vast constellation of minds and minions.
In contrast, much of ancient science was driven by singular geniuses.
This brings me to the massive replication effort that just got published:
We replicated 21 social science experiments in Science or Nature. We succeeded with 13. Replication effect sizes were half of originals. All materials, data, code, & reports: https://t.co/Uq1R5SUHNo, preprint https://t.co/aDEctL7yUx, Nature Human Behavior https://t.co/5VSJ86avAC pic.twitter.com/dVrSK922Cb
— Brian Nosek (@BrianNosek) August 27, 2018
There are lots of angles to this story. Mostly good. But Jonathan Haidt pointed out how important this makes collaboration and a culture of truth-seeking within the enterprise. Alexandra Elbakyan has stated that her scientific activism is driven by “communist ideals.” And though I dislike Communism, I do think there is something fundamentally communistic about science. In Uncontrolled Jim Manzi points out that within the world of science there are very strong norms about honesty. A major issue with scientific fraud is scientists are trusting.
But then there is the von Neumann factor: geniuses can accelerate and open up whole landscapes of research. They do a “different kind of science.” It’s less culturally embedded, and less social and incremental. They are the sparks which fly in the darkness. Ratiocination machines of a different kind and ken from mortal man.
The moral of the story, if there’s any, is that modern science is a synthesis of these two aspects. There is the “industrial” aspect of scale, efficiency, and incrementalism. One step at a time into the darkness, cautious and continuous. This is science that Adam Smith would be proud of. International, specialized, and efficient. Optimized.
And then there are the startling breakthroughs. Sometimes those breakthroughs are genius and insight. Consider the story of the emergence of String Theory outlined in Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics. Smolin is a skeptic of String Theory, but in the book, he describes how rapidly it took the scientific world by storm, just by force of its insight and elegance.
In contrast, there are cases such as CRISPR, where several different groups seem to have “stumbled” onto it (this resembles the “rediscovery” of genetics in the early 20th century). The genius here is less in the humans than in what nature had invented, and what humans discovered through trial, error, and luck. Nevertheless, in a few years, CRISPR radically transformed the possibilities in “genetic engineering.”
Going forward, big collaborative science will keep lumbering on. It will play the role that it has played for decades, driving translation, laying the seedbed for innovation. Normal science. But every now and then a spark will fly, and a new flame will explode. Genius still has a role to play in the firmament of human advancement.
Technology seems to be a bit different from science in that regard, in that (at least in the modern era) it seems a lot less linked to any particular creator’s efforts. If somebody who in real life designed and built something useful didn’t exist, someone else probably was doing the project in roughly the same time period but didn’t finish it as quickly (like the invention of the telephone).
1) Koestler weighed in heavily on this question, of course:
https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-History-Changing-Universe-Classics-ebook/dp/B06VSXFQJH
2) And one can’t talk Modern vs. pre- Science without the as-usual searingly succinct Whitehead toss-off:
“Modern physical science is the issue of a coordinated effort, sustained for more than three centuries, to understand those activities of nature by reason of which the transitions of sense-perception occur.”
Put that in your CERN, and smoke it! 🙂
“To me, the biggest difference between early modern Western science, as it emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and what came before, is that it was a cultural concert of thinkers, a vast constellation of minds and minions”
— yes! and the West had not only a constelation of great minds, but was developing the social tools to promote their interations with each other (even through time) and with society itself: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and so on. If Galileo was in a moderate danger when he wrote his book, Newton and Leibniz was in a much better time to flourish a few decades later.
Your description of “Industrial Science” and “Genius Science” is indeed a better description than Kuhnian mambo-jambo of “structural scientific revolutions”.
I was rather hoping there’d be some talk about what might be “those [other] activities of nature by reason of which the transitions of sense perception [do NOT] occur.”
But, ::crickets::.
Is instrumented empiricism really all we got ova heah?
Methinks the genuinely inspired scientists do drink from a yet deeper well..
I’d say that though science might be more collaborative than now, the difference between science pre and post the scientific revolution isn’t about that at all.
Per basic science, Aristotle really couldn’t do basic science in his way as before. Pre the scientific revolution, Aristotle’s definition of the word ‘physical’ held sway, in that blood looks red because it’s red, one hears the sound of a tree crashing, because the sound of the crash as you hear it is in the air, the smell and/or taste of apple pie as one smells/tastes it is in the pie, and water feels wet because it is wet. Aristotle’s theory of the physical is that the physical world is accurately, not merely consistently, like one’s sense experiences, as in the world is really like how one sees/hears/tastes/smells/feels it.
The mathematical atomism of the scientific revolution denies all of that.
Post scientific revolution, which is the redefinition of the meaning of the word ‘physical’ by Galileo and Descartes, but mostly Descartes, none of this is true anymore, ‘red’, ‘sound of the crash’, ‘apple pie smell/taste’, and ‘wetness’ aren’t physical, they are mental states of mind caused by the physical world, but they themselves are not physical, hence dualism, or the ghost in the machine, which is something that modern science assumes, as in the ghost in the machine is something that is assumed every time one accepts a truth claim of science as it’s done now.
There’s more to dualism than this, like dualism is necessary for a creature that does math. Most of Descartes’ ideas about the physical were known to Aristotle, it’s just that he rejected them as a bit ‘out there’. If one could show him how successful science became by adopting Descartes ideas about the meaning of the word physical over his, Aristotle would probably have gone along, modern science is pretty convincing that way, no matter how ‘out there’ the modern or Cartesian definition of the word ‘physical’ is. Aristotle was right that the modern definition of the word physical is a bit crazy to think that given it’s particulars and how the men that came up with it came up with it, that it works, but it does.