by Ulf Wolf
:: The Paths ::
To better convey this brotherhood, this true one-ness of the three paths, I wish to lay their historical foundation; I now wish to map their respective journeys from their origin-past into their (often far too) divergent present.
:: Science ::
Aristotle hails Thales as the inventor of science. I think this is debatable. Bertrand Russell, for one, believes that Thales learned most of what he knew from the Babylonians, and I believe history bears this out.
No, Thales did not invent science. I think that the first human being who inspected something from various angles with a view to understand it better, I think he or she invented science—if indeed such a thing as science can be invented.
I think that curiosity is the mother of science.
From its early, and by most yardsticks humble beginnings, science has grown into one of the most lauded (and these days over-lauded, in my view) and influential fields of human endeavor. Today, an army of her branches scour for and investigate virtually everything that can be observed or detected, and science as a whole has no lesser aim than to shape the way we understand the universe, our planet, ourselves, and other living things.
She sometimes succeeds, sometimes not.
One of her vital trademarks—we could even call it her Code—is that what she discovers must be found by objective analysis rather than by personal experience or belief (a principle that is not always followed). This approach, honestly adhered to, will accumulate knowledge with time and will so allow science to strive ever higher with earlier discoveries as its foundation.
Vital parts of this foundation, such as, for example, our understanding of numbers, were laid by ancient civilizations. Other scientific insights, such as our isolation and understanding of cancer-causing genes or of quarks, date back less than 80 years.
On paper, all scientists, be they current or ancient, take the same systematic approach: based on the now known, look farther, deeper, higher, and add to it.
We refer to this approach as the scientific method.
Scientific Method
Whereas philosophy on occasion also ponders the question how?, it primarily concerns itself with the question why? Science, on the other hand, focuses nearly exclusively on the question how?
Most of today’s scientists hold that modern science—and with it the concept of scientific method—originated with the Renaissance; but if you look more closely, you’ll detect the rudiments of scientific approach—what I’d call methodic curiosity—throughout human history.
Cornerstones
The cornerstones of the scientific method consist of an objective approach to any investigation, and of accepted results.
The precept of objectivity means that we have to observe things as they are, without yielding to the somewhat procrustean temptation to force such observations into accord with preconceived views or other hobby horses.
The precept of acceptability stipulates that observations or experiments made by one can uniformly be reproduced by another. Scientific findings, in other words, must hold true for all who investigate any given set of conditions and phenomena.
Reasoning
By use more than definition, scientific method deploys both inductive reasoning (that reasoning which proceeds from specific observations and experiments: a penny dropped will fall to the ground; to form more general hypotheses and theories: there is such a thing as gravity) and deductive reasoning (that reasoning which travels the other way—from intuited theories or hypotheses to predict and/or account for specific, observed phenomena: we postulate a force called gravity; so, if let go: this penny should fall to the ground).
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 se
e, 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 1st 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.
Also, by this time, Christianity had gained an irreversible foothold on the Western world, and since all you ever needed to know about the world and about the universe was amply covered in the Bible, there was no need for science. In fact, by then, science was viewed as a threat to the religious powers that be.
And as if to underscore this state of affairs, in 529 CE, both the Lyceum and the Academy finally closed their doors, and those were the last two nails in our early scientific coffin.
Chinese Science
While Western Europe suffered its scientific slumber—a nap that was to last from about 500 to 1400 CE—it contributed little in the way of scientific thought. Rather (and most likely out of greed) European philosophers-cum-scientists mainly dabbled in alchemy, that occult pseudoscience that sprung from the delusion that you could turn inferior metals into gold.
Now, it should be mentioned that alchemy did foster some discoveries, one being sulfuric acid, which was first documented in the early 14th century. For real scientific progress, however, we have to turn elsewhere: to China and to the Arab world.
Keep in mind that Chinese science developed wholly independently of Greece or Europe, and so followed a different pattern.