[MD] Chaos

[PhaedrusWolff at carolina.rr.com]

I'm sure you all have read this, but I thought it worth posting here 
anyway;

There was a passage he (Phaedrus) had read and repeated to himself so 
many times it survives intact. It begins: 
In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are 
they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. 
Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual 
power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid 
experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be 
found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on 
this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord 
to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out 
of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be 
some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types 
we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would 
never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of 
nothing but creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- 
are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like 
each other than the hosts of the rejected. 
What has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- 
escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless 
dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely 
tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings 
into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely 
through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours 
apparently built for eternity. 
The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named 
Albert Einstein. 
Phædrus had finished his first year of University science at the age 
of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to 
specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds 
now known as molecular biology. He didn't think of this as a career 
for his own personal advancement. He was very young and it was a kind 
of noble idealistic goal. 
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin 
to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes 
from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. 
If Phædrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes 
it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature 
of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself. But he did ask 
them, and was unsatisfied with the answers. 
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 had 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 -- . 
Intuition? 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." 
Phædrus' 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 hypotheses, 
was 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 
that 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. 
If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law 
is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the 
general validity of all scientific method! 
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a 
multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster 
than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all 
hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, 
then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire 
scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven 
knowledge. 
About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given 
moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always 
proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," and let it go at that. 
But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any 
given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that 
truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most 
basic presumption of all science! 
But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of 
continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time 
spans of permanence seemed completely random he could see no order in 
them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for 
less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, 
but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything 
else. 
He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the 
apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the 
time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the 
intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the 
twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of 
the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, 
in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the 
life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to 
perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the 
existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the 
more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what 
seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades 
seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you 
look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a 
multitude you are increasing the multit
ude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward 
unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you 
actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is 
your application of scientific method that is causing it to change! 
What Phædrus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly 
characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under 
the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and 
the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed 
here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The 
purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among 
many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what 
science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the 
opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, 
information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is 
leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, 
indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, 
the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is 
supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what 
Phædrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory wor
k years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. 
Scientifically produced antiscience...chaos.