Popular science

Science is like Freud and Marx: a ravaged source of literary bleating. Type the word Freudian, psychoanalytic, Jungian, archetype, Marxist or socialist into a standard essay, and you've got an A, my friend. A few years ago, Ian McEwan wrote Solar, which coerces climate change to shake hands with more bleating about culture and philosophy, while some very unamused scientists watch. Science has been made into a concept! At least Freud and Marx encouraged our adoration. Science was happily breaking things and putting them back together to see if it could when we took a photo and stole its reflection.

Karl Popper was a smart man, but doesn't draw the same kind of crowd as Freud and co. In fact, I know educated people who do not know who he is. (And here is where the problem at hand throws itself at us. Duck! I have to exclude all the other things Popper said to make my point and this may be the only thing about Popper you and I will ever know. Which may be fine, but which may also distort our understanding of the world. Because what I say Popper said may not be not be what he said, strictly speaking.)

Popper devised a scientific method, which was meant to scaffold how hypotheses were tested and/or proved, so that we don't ignore the next guy who says the world is round-ish. Basically, try to prove the opposite of what you want to prove. This way you save yourself time, by identifying gaps and exceptions, so that you can adapt your hypothesis and then try to prove the opposite, and you don't taint the whole thing - and science itself - with your desire to be right.

Please read something about Popper, even Wikipaedia. So that I do not hold myself responsible for your trust in me.

I don't put much faith in my senses, especially after watching The Matrix and reading the novels of Philip K. Dick, or just media in general, and passing first-year philosophy (which obviously makes me an authority). (I certainly don't put much faith in your senses.) (Do I need to go over the irreconcilability of the words 'subjective' and 'truth' again?) Neither do I put my faith in science. Wait! What I'm saying is that faith and science are also irreconcilable.

Science is a description of, well, everything, including the things I don't put much faith in. Hypotheses are the labels we stick to things. The things themselves don't care much whether we stick them on by gravity or tape, which is really my point: some hypotheses are no-brainers (unless you want to deny the flow of electricity or how paper is made) and others are informed guesses (how Allosaurus ate (like a falcon, ripping at the flesh) and that the universe is expanding).

You spotted it, huh? The contradiction? I don't have faith in my senses or yours, but I accept that science has a good strike rate? Ah, young Padawan, but science doesn't care. It also doesn't read Philip K. Dick.

Just a hop, skip and jump, and we've arrived at another point. (Another one? You struck it lucky, folks.) Science is not a religion, nor does it build altars nor gather followers. It just (altogether now) doesn't care. Oh, there are fanatics and fundamentalists and extremists, who think the choice is stiff-upper-lipped logic or bust. Every concept in the history of history has some of those. People who need a yoke, but preferably not the one everyone else is chained to, because clearly their brains have been wiped free of psychology and all that angst of growing up without a pool.

We're getting there...

I failed Science in Grade 9, which meant I couldn't take it in Grade 10. I was smart enough for Biology and Maths though. Then I grew up and began to decide for myself who I am and found, despite the attempts of the best textbooks, I really like science. Really, who doesn't? Trees, planes, dancing; the world is a set of things that can be hypothesised and described (although, granted, that doesn't make the hypothesese right). Okay, maybe I only like pseudo-science. Magazines and books about pseudo-science, and maybe the odd experiment.

Ok, ok, I like knowledge, but maybe that's the same thing. Except I fall on the sceptic side of the epistemological scale. I grew up without a pool, okay!

I was reading one of these magazines when it told me (blithely) that Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment to show that quantum physics and the laws of relativity abide by the same logic. Because the cat is alive and dead until you observe it. Only if it's the size of an atom... See, Schrodinger placed his cat in a box (black and white, fyi) with a poison bomb. Until you open the box, you can't know whether the cat is alive or dead. (Unless you kick the box and the cat kicks back.) Note the preposition here: and vs or.

This writer may have been a fundamentalist and is definitely a solipsist, because if something could be bigger than an atom and in two states at once, I'd observe the food in my refrigerator never going off and my favourite characters in a series never getting their heads chopped off during the Red Wedding.

The cat gets maybe poisoned to show that the physical world is not governed by the laws of tiny solipsistical things. Not that that really needs proving but we humans need to understand our world and educate others including fundamentalists. Newton and Einstein can rest easy for the time being. So can gravity.

How did this error get into a well-known science magazine? (Having been in magazine publishing before, I can tell you, but that would be like showing you that there is only glitter in the middle of my crystal ball.) This is a whopper but most mistakes are more subtle. Honestly, if you are interested in science, it won't be long before you discover the world isn't magic and that the cat is dead because it isn't moving or making a noise and so you are the worst kind of human being. It is the danger of simplifying something you need to beware of.

Like, you are an artist and you're painting a tree (you're bored and there aren't any cats in boxes around). The leaf is green, you think, pulling out your pre-mixed paint. Er, it's also yellow. And blue. Maybe purple. Dark green, light green, even some red. You tell a five-year-old the leaf is green (and hopefully they will look at you askance because clearly a thing can be more than one thing at a time), but you tell a budding artist to look more closely (whereupon they may also look at you askance).

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good example. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't recommend the geology section to a geologist, because he knows the leaf isn't just green. Or something. Karl Marx and Audrey Hepburn may have lived and died in the same century, but that doesn't tell me much about the 20th century except that Karl Marx mistrusted wealth and Breakfast at Tiffany's is about Holly Golightly ogling a diamonds in a jewellery store display.

Richard Dawkins also writes science books, but he does so with a cattle prod in his other hand and none of his books have geology sections. Phew. Imagine what he could do to geostrata.

Even having read that noxious editorial error and despite some misgivings, I purchased a copy of Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future. Oh, I haven't read it yet. It's just that, he has written more books than I can count on one hand, and the titles deteriorate with time from Introduction to Superstrings to The Future of the Mind. This particular book considers time travel and AI. Seriously considers it. Even when history teaches us that it goes its own way and science doesn't care.

Another of his books is Parallel Worlds. It explores the multiverse - you can take it from here - a series of bubble universes. Theoretically, there is another me who didn't fall for the nonsense about doing something you love and suffering for your art. She is being paid to travel around the world and consult with large firms about something very boring but very specialised. Or she is living her principles and doing charity work because either she doesn't mind sharing a room with three students or she has a rich husband.

This is all apparently part of a part of string theory, which is part of an attempt to explain why Schrodinger's Cat lets Schrodinger put him in a box in the first place. In other words, it wants to be The Grand Unifying Theory and explain why atoms can be in two places at once but my begonias are dead and not waiting for me to observe them being alive.

String theory is the frontrunner (although that doesn't mean you have to accept the multiverse - not that the universe cares), or so science writers tell me. But, the other day, a reliable (aren't they all...) science news site described a new theory based on the nature of copying in digital media. (In literature, we call that simulacra, but hey, I don't put faith in my senses anyway.) Now I'm perpetuating the sloppiness of pseudo-science, because that was one of the only things I understand. And another scientist from another elite university endorsed the paper, though I think he was sniggering at the end.

Popper can't help me here. What is the opposite of the Copier Theory? The Deletion Theory? Instead of a universe, a zeroverse, a finiteverse, a cat-in-the-boxverse? I'm going back to bleating because a Freudian or Marxist reading of the philosophy of science is far easier than disproving hypotheses of people who may or may not be oversimplifying things and convincing you that the universe depends on you noticing it.

It's difficult to resist the romance that you can will things alive or dead, that you know everything about the world and that everything is connected at some abstract level. Even when you put little faith in your senses and less in those of someone else. Which is why I shall read the book and tell you that all these things are true because a guy who looks very much like Einstein wrote it down. I like science fiction. However, I may never finish Dawkins' The God Delusion, the Joyce and Ulysses of the scientific world.