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Morning Science Quote
By Michael White | June 8th 2009 06:05 AM | 4 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist


... Full Bio

 There are certainly more mysteries than knowledge and, perhaps, more ways of finding out than science. I like science because when you think of something you can check it by experiment; "yes" or "no", Nature says, and you go on from there progressively. Other wisdom has no equally certain way of separating truth from falsehood. So I have taken the easy course with easy methods.

    - Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track, p. 356  








Comments

I like that quote showing how scientific research is a journey going on progressively checking your milestones. It's becoming more and more difficult though in high energy physics and cosmology to check your thoughts with experiments.

Arjen (not verified) | 06/22/09 | 02:26 AM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
That's why these fields have been subject for some pointed criticism lately. I think in order for something to be science, you have to be able to check your ideas against nature.  As it gets more difficult to do that, we bump up against the limits of what we can know, and enter the realm of conjecture - although conjecture can have it's uses.

Michael White | 06/22/09 | 15:25 PM
Gerhard Adam's picture
The problem occurs in determining where to draw that line (between conjecture and science).  It seems that as long as some knowledge can be used to forecast or predict behavior, then it is scientific since it can be validated against theory.  If it has "no future" that can be validated, then it can never be known and would, by definition, always be relegated to be conjecture.

Gerhard Adam | 06/22/09 | 15:41 PM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
Part of the difficulty comes from not knowing when you've hit an absolute dead end - a direction that will never lead to any testable ideas.  

Michael White | 06/22/09 | 21:43 PM

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