Miss Buddha (86 page)

Pressing these two paths of reasoning into
service, science aims to discover, develop, and encode broad
laws—such as Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation—that then, in turn,
aid our understanding of the natural world.

Considering the scope of
what science attempts to examine and understand—which is, well,
everything—one soon realizes that there is no one
single
“scientific
approach” since its now myriad separate disciplines often differ
greatly both in subject matter and in how they approach their
subjects.

So, there is no
single
path to scientific
discovery and we can form no one clear-cut description that will
embrace all the ways and manners to pursue scientific truth. The
pursuit of scientific truth, in other words, is subject matter
dependent: while we cannot dissect, but only observe a star, we can
do a lot more than just observe a corpse.

So, to say that we use
the
scientific method
in our research is to say nothing, precisely, about how we are
going about our investigation. It depends entirely on what we are
investigating.

Bacon and Descartes

Francis Bacon, an early
writer on scientific method, put this to paper in the 1600s:
“Thorough observation and tabulation of a sufficiently large number
of manifestations or phenomena of nature will invariably lead us to
theories accounting for those manifestations and phenomena.” This,
of course, is a prime sample of an
inductive
approach.

A little farther south, and
almost concurrently, René Descartes took the opposite tack in his
attempt to account for observed phenomena on the basis of what he
called “clear and distinct ideas.” The
deductive
approach.

Galileo

In Italy, and again almost concurrently,
Galileo, in his study of falling bodies, deployed a scientific
method that indeed resembles the one used by today’s physical
scientists.

Observing that objects fall
to the ground with increasing speed, he deduced—or, more accurately
stated (for language does have the habit of sometimes pressing one
word into service for two meanings):
induced
—the hypothesis that
the speed attained is directly proportional to
the distance traveled
.

Unable, however, to test this hypothesis
directly, he instead stated the hypothesis that objects falling
unequal distances require the same amount of elapsed time.

This he could test, and when he did so, he
discovered this hypothesis to be incorrect, and that, logically,
then, so was his first hypothesis.

He then formed the
different hypothesis that
the speed
attained is directly proportional to the time elapsed
(and not the distance traveled). From this he was
able to eventually extrapolate that the distance traveled by a
falling object is proportional to the square of the time elapsed,
and this hypothesis he was able to verify experimentally by rolling
balls down an inclined plane.

Galileo was a brilliant man, if somewhat
cowardly—when push came to deadly shove.

Although an agreement between a conclusion
and a single observation does not prove the correctness of the
hypothesis on which the conclusion is based, it does go a ways to
render such a hypothesis more plausible.

Scientific Truth

The true test of scientific hypotheses and
their conclusions lie in their uniform agreement with all other
aspects within a scientific framework. In other words: do all data
observed, under the same conditions, and at all times, point to and
so validate this conclusion?

If the answer is yes, then, and only then,
does science recognize due diligence and only then will she
recognize the conclusion as scientifically proven.

As scientific truth.

In this environment, the popular exception
that proves the rule does not even leave ground for a single
deviation would render the conclusion false.

Weak Link

The scientific method does, however, have a
weak link and a grave one at that: the scientist. He or she is (at
least so far) human, and may well, like other human beings, be
swayed by prevailing worldview or personal pet theories, and so may
take more kindly to certain experimental results than others. This
to a degree that selective blindness may develop.

One case in point would be the
Fleischmann–Pons purported discovery of “cold fusion” which,
pressured by the University of Utah’s desire to establish priority
on the discovery, they announced far too soon, and which discovery
was soon disproven and disgraced. A clear-cut case of scientists
seeing what they hope and wish to see, and not what is actually
seen.

No other scientists were able to replicate
the Fleischmann-Pons experiment, and so their findings and
hypothesis were found false. Some scientists even went so far as to
refer to the Utah report as “a result of the incompetence and
delusion of Pons and Fleischmann.”

On the whole, though, and in fairness to the
scientific community, it does, as a rule, judge the work of its
members objectively, which is why, so far, the scientific method
prevails.

A Whirlwind History

As I implied earlier, were humans not curious
we would have no such thing as science today. But as luck would
have it—at least as far as science goes—not only are we a curious
lot, our species has a natural ability to observe and then to
organize and record such observations as well.

While other forms of life—say dogs, mice,
dead cats—display curiosity as well, only humans—as far as we can
tell, anyway—possess the skill to organize and then record such
observations and knowledge (which record then forms the foundation,
a springboard, for future discoveries).

Our Dawn

At the dawn of curiosity, we made simple
records of our observations: shapes as paintings on cave walls,
numerical information as carvings on bones or stones. Although we
may well have also used other means of setting down numbers, such
as knots in leather cords, or cuts in sticks of wood, we have no
way of ascertaining this since both leather and wood are perishable
and leave no traces.

With the invention of writing about 6,000
years ago, however, we discovered a more flexible way of putting
down what we observed and discovered. We found a way to record
knowledge.

Writing first saw daylight in Mesopotamia,
one of the earliest centers of urban civilization—at least of the
Western variety. Located as it was between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, it is no wonder that the word Mesopotamia is Greek for
“between the rivers.”

Initially, these early authors devised a
pictographic script, inscribing various lifelike symbols on tablets
of clay. With time, however—and due to perhaps laziness or
expedience, or both—these symbols morphed into cuneiform, a script
composed of wedge-shaped marks.

Thanks to the longevity of clay, more than a
handful of these ancient tablets have survived to our times, and
they show—surprisingly—that as writing first took root, the
Mesopotamians already had a keen grasp of mathematics, astronomy,
and chemistry, and of symptoms to identify common diseases.

During the two thousand years to follow, and
as Mesopotamian culture grew more sophisticated, mathematics in
particular grew into a thriving science. And since it was now
recorded for posterity, their knowledge accumulated rapidly, and by
1000 BCE we find the scientists of the time beginning to assemble
private libraries to consolidate and protect their recorded
discoveries.

To the southwest of Mesopotamia, the ancient
Egyptians, independent of the Mesopotamians, developed their own
form of pictographic script, writing on papyrus, or inscribing text
in stone. Egyptian records from around 1500 BCE show that they also
had a good grasp of diseases and their symptoms, as well as of
astronomy and mathematicians—amply demonstrated by the virtually
perfect symmetry of the pyramids.

Greece and Rome

The peoples of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt
both recorded knowledge primarily for practical needs. Astronomical
observations, for example, led to early calendars, which in turn
helped organize their farming seasons.

But when we turn to ancient Greece—the
acknowledged birthplace of Western science—we find that a new kind
of scientific inquiry had found fertile soil. Here, curiosity ran
deeper; here, philosophers and other seekers sought knowledge
largely for its own sake.

Here, they sought truth for the sake of
truth.

Thales

While not, in my opinion,
the
inventor
of
science (for how can you invent curiosity?), Thales of Miletus was
nevertheless one of the first to postulate and then set out to
isolate natural and
observable
causes for natural phenomena.

Preceding his more famous brethren by a good
century—he was born around 625 BCE—most historians do view him as
the father of Greek science/philosophy, and he is generally
credited with introducing geometry to Greece (something he probably
picked up in his travels). A keen observer and brilliant
astronomer, he is on record as having predicted the May 28, 585 BCE
eclipse of the sun, a very impressive feat considering the state of
astronomy at the time, and the tools at hand.

Yet, for all these
impressive scientific observations, Thales viewed himself as
a
philosopher
,
though, of course, at that time no true distinction had been drawn
between philosophy and science: it was all a search for
truth.

As for the universe, according to the
curious Thales, everything boils down to water. Everything is
basically water. Everything proceeds from water, and
everything—after a sojourn through other forms and
substances—eventually returns to water.

While perhaps a little wide of the mark, it
would serve one well to keep in mind that before Thales, no one (on
record, at any rate) had attempted to explain the universe based on
sheer observation and in terms of physical substance. Rather, prior
to him, the view of the universe had been largely mythological.

Thales’ approach—and I
would certainly give him this—marked the birth of the scientific
approach. Unfortunately, Thales left no writings; what we know of
him we have learned from Aristotle, and his accounts of Thales in
his
Metaphysics
.

Thales and his successors also speculated
about the nature of Earth herself. Thales—true champion that he was
of water—believed the Earth to be a flat disk floating on water.
Pythagoras, however, one of ancient Greece’s most celebrated
mathematicians, and a mystic to boot, begged to differ. He held
that Earth was spherical.

Pythagoras also surmised that the Earth
moved in a circular orbit—though not around the Sun, mind you, but
around a “central fire” (location not immediately evident).
Although flawed and widely disputed, this (at the time) outrageous
suggestion nonetheless marked a leap of scientific thought: it
heralded the idea that Earth might not, after all, be the center of
the universe.

Atoms

Another startling scientific
intuition sprang from the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his
student Democritus of Abdera when they (around 400 BCE, give or
take) proposed that all matter is made up of
indivisible
atoms. This, mind you,
more than two thousand years before that notion finally found its
rightful place in the annals of modern science.

Reason

Let me now stress that not only were these
ancient philosophers (or scientists) curious about natural
phenomena, they also discerned and studied the nature of
reasoning.

At the two great schools of
Greek philosophy in Athens—the Academy, founded by Plato, and the
Lyceum, founded by Plato’s pupil Aristotle—students were taught how
to reason logically. And here we encounter, for the first time in
the West, our two cornerstones to the scientific method:
induction
—drawing general
conclusions from particular cases; and
deduction
—the inference of new facts
from something already assumed or known.

This schooling and logical approach to
curiosity lead to remarkable progress over the two centuries
following Aristotle’s death in 322 BCE.

A few striking examples:

By comparing the Sun’s height above the
horizon in two different places, the mathematician, astronomer, and
geographer Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference, producing
a figure that was later found to be accurate to within 1 percent.
No small feat, again considering the state of the science and the
tools at hand.

Archimedes, another celebrated Greek
mathematician, studied and laid the foundations of mechanics. He
also pioneered the science of hydrostatics, the study of the
behavior of fluids at rest.

Theophrastus founded the science of botany,
providing detailed and vivid descriptions of a wide variety of
plant species as well as investigating the germination process in
seeds.

Greek Decline

The
1
^st
century BCE, however, saw a slowing and then a virtual dead
stop of Western scientific progress.

Roman influence was by now eclipsing that of
Greece and, although skilled at war (witness the span of her
empire), law, engineering, and administration, the practical Romans
had little interest in basic science. As a result, little science
was done during the all too practical days of the Roman Empire.