Science History: Telling or Quaint

Studies in studying

John Beatty

Jul 1, 2023

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge
Carl Sagan

In recent years, mass media and politicians have bombarded us with nonsensical phrases like “follow the science.” The phrase is nonsensical because science is a method, not a result or a path to take. Oxford defines it as:

…the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.

However, Oxford also gives another definition, calling it archaic:

…knowledge of any kind.

As Sagan says, it’s a way of thinking, a process, not an information set. To say that “science says” this or that or something else is to mis-characterize the practice. It would be more accurate to say that “the current product of scientific thought is…” but that takes too long. Most pundits, trying to prove their points, will simply say “the science says” and leave it at that, expecting that their “science” is fixed, like history is fixed…and we all know that it ain’t. And no, this is not a word game…

History of A Process

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.
Marie Curie

Science history is a newer field. I say newer because practitioners of the hard sciences have always been interested in the history of their fields because they want to build on what others have done before, or avoid dead ends. In time, the typical scientist will compile notes that run into volumes, tens of thousands of words. That’s a lot to study, and a lot to replicate. But that’s how science works: start somewhere, find something out, record/publish it, keep moving. It is not a static process; never has been. The study of that study and its progression is newer, only in the past fifty years or so, and the practice has been fairly restricted to other scientists in similar or the same fields.

Settled Science is an oxymoron.

History tells us this, not scientists. No matter what anyone says today, someone else will say something different tomorrow. There was a time when “everyone knew” that humans couldn’t go into space because no vehicle could move fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity. There was also a time when “science authorities” asserted that the world would need only a dozen computers at a time. I have more in my car…

Science has always been in a quest for resources.

Practitioners of science have always been net consumers of the resources of any commonweal for much of their existence. To be useful, they must first be trained, and that can take not years, but decades during which they aren’t earning much of their keep. Even before what we now call “modern science” came around, budding workers in knowledge had a tremendous amount of learning to do. What makes the Edisons of the world so remarkable is that their education is minimal, but their abilities phenomenal. There are few Edisons, however, and they are becoming fewer. But Edison the scientist was also Edison the businessman, and he could pay for most of his research by selling his products. Unfortunately, not all scientists can say that.

Science can improve our life, but it doesn’t come cheap.

When I talked about John Deere’s plow a few weeks ago, I left out a few thousand years of work in agronomy, metallurgy and genetics that made his plow possible and useful. Generations of farmers had to test, fail and succeed to make crops that could produce edible, not just salable, and storable food. The corn you see today is the product of hundreds of years of study and experimenting…of science by another name. That big billet of cast steel that John Deere put in his plow didn’t happen overnight. The steel alone took thousands of years to develop, let alone techniques to make castings that large stable enough to use.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin

Historians of science have been interested in the products of scientific inquiry, not so much the process…except medicine, which is interested in both process and product. While our pre-scientific method forbears weren’t ignorant, they weren’t always that smart, either. Doctors bled their patients to relieve them of their ill humors as late as the 19th century, though not in the US, we’re told. Heart surgery needed the impetus of dying children—blue babies—before Blalock broke the ages-old taboos against touching the heart using Thomas’ techniques. Navigators in the Roman era weren’t sure where the edge of the world was, but they knew there was one because their maps said as much. Before the first brave soul made a correlation between changes in barometers and changes in the weather, no one thought about changes in atmospheric pressure as a cause. Today, concerns about artificial intelligence have been driven primarily by Hollywood, not by science (not that some aren’t valid).

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan

Any history of science should to be driven not by scientists looking for answers in the past but by scholars looking for clues to the present. Scientists look at the past all the time for something to build on. Historians should look at the past of scientific or technical development for what it can tell us about how we got here, but it cannot say how we’re going to go forward. The scientific past can’t tell us that.

History is our only test for the consequences of ideas
John D. Beatty

The consequences of scientific development can be both good and bad—we know that. The ideas that drive some of them, however, don’t all come out of a laboratory. Eugenics, that safe-sounding idea, began as a movement to improve humanity overall. Regrettably, the “science” required certain people be forbidden from reproducing, and those people objected…so did others. Then, in the name of saving certain “races” of people, certain other “races” were to be, ah, eliminated—killed off. Folks objected to that, too.

All in the name of “science.”

Not that long ago, an entertainer was censured by her employer and her peers and her audience because she suggested the Holocaust wasn’t about “race.” Regrettably for everyone who shamed her into an apology…she was right. Judaism is not a “race” anymore than Catholicism is. Neither is homosexuality, or Anabaptism or any other non-genetic identity group the Nazis and other eugenicists wanted to eliminate, when eugenics was considered a science. But some modern “science” says that the color of your skin defines your “race.” It does to the anthropologists or sociologists…or eugenicists.

There is but one scientifically verifiable and provable race: human.

So Whoopi was right…but we don’t like to admit it because doing so upends the whole “white supremacy” thing, which is, according to some, science. The idea of “race” as a separate appearance or religion or behavior or place of origin is not hard evidence-based science but soft “I believe this because it makes me feel good” science. Depending on who you ask, soft science requires no testable proof and deals with human behaviors and appearances by observation and opinion…and feelings. When modern academic mathematicians claim their field operates in “whiteness,” they create a whole other one that defies science and delves into politics. You think the Church didn’t have a political stake in declaring Galileo a heretic?

Nothing is new or exceptional in the history of science.

Current calls for “feminist physics” have echoes of “Jewish physics” in Germany in the ‘40s. Claiming that “mathematics operates in whiteness” makes not quite as much sense as saying that 1=0 if you can perform an interpretive dance to prove it…which is also making the rounds. What these fashionable positions are amount to calls for equity in the populations of physicists and mathematicians. Laudable, but questionable as to motives and ways of going about it. There are some who argue for quotas in these fields because…well, because. Won’t advance the fields in the least anymore than the ‘90s quest for a gene for homosexuality resulted in anything more than a few calls for more research.

So, quaint or telling?

It’s a little of both, frankly, and a lot of neither. Those who have a stake in their fields have politicized their science for a very long time. Science needs money, and to get money, it needs patrons who have an interest in the results of the field. And some developments are less savory than others. Some “sciences” have been discredited over the years, like eugenics, phrenology (the study of the skull to determine personality), chiropody (that considered the foot to be the same as a bird’s, and practitioners didn’t need medical degrees) and cryptozoology (the study of legendary animals). But money pours into some research fields because important—read wealthy—people have a stake in them. I’d just like someone to take an interest in sarcoidosis some day…maybe find a cure…because after 40+ years suffering with it, it’s gotten old.

Coming Up…

Independence Day Vilifications
The Ankh-Morpork Civil War: A Lesson in Historiography

And Finally…

On 1 July:

1646: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Germany. A true polymath, Leibnitz had his hand in mathematics, philosophy, diplomacy, physics, law, ethics, theology, and politics. Some scholars argue Leibnitz was the spark of the German Enlightenment.

1983: R. Buckminster Fuller died in Los Angeles, California. Another polymath, Fuller was trained as an architect and is best remembered as the inventor of the geodesic dome and the failed Dymaxion car. He also popularized the terms “Spaceship Earth” and “Dymaxion,” which is a portmanteau of dynamic, maximum, and tension.

And today is both NATIONAL POSTAL WORKER DAY and NATIONAL US POSTAGE STAMP DAY. It was on this day in 1919 that first-class postage dropped from 3 cents to 2 cents. And, on this day in 1963, the Zone Improvement Program/ZIP codes went into effect in the US.