Chapter 142 23.2 Gaps in the web of scientific knowledge

There is a crack, a gap, in the framework of knowledge that we call science.The gap is filled by young people with a passion for science who do not carry the baggage imposed by their wise predecessors.And this gap made me curious about the space of science. Scientific knowledge is a parallel distributed system.There is no center, no one is in control.It contains countless wise minds and scattered books.It is also a network, a system in which facts and theories interact and co-evolve.But as a network of actors exploring in parallel in the rugged and mysterious realm, the field of scientific research is far wider than any field I have touched upon here.A mere treatise of the structure of science properly would require the creation of a much longer book than I have done so far.In this concluding chapter I can only touch so far on this complex system.

Knowledge, truth and information flow within networks and community systems.I have always been fascinated by the structure of scientific knowledge, because it seems to be bumpy and uneven in thickness.Much of our common understanding of scientific knowledge has its origins in small fields, and in between there are vast deserts of ignorance.I can interpret the observed data now as a result of positive feedback and attractors.A little knowledge can explain many phenomena around, and the new interpretation enlightens the knowledge itself, so the corners of knowledge expand rapidly.And vice versa, ignorance begets ignorance.In the field of ignorance, everyone avoids it, so it becomes more and more ignorant.The result is an uneven landscape of self-contained mountains of knowledge stretched across vast deserts of ignorance.

What fascinates me most about this culturally generated space are those deserts—those gaps in scientific understanding.What can we know about the unknown?The best looming hope of evolutionary theory is to unravel the mystery of why organisms don't change, because static is more pervasive than change and harder to explain.How much can we learn about invariance in a changing system?What does the gap in change tell us about the overall change?So what I took the leap to explore was the cognitive gap in the overall space. This particular book is all over the gaps as well as the whole.I don't know far more than I know, but unfortunately it is much harder to say what I don't know than what I do know.Due to the nature of ignorance, I certainly cannot know all the gaps in the knowledge I have.Admitting your ignorance is a great recipe.The same is true of scientific cognition.A comprehensive delineation of the gaps in human scientific cognition may be the next leap forward in science.

Scientists today believe that science is constantly evolving.They explain how science develops through models that make small changes.From this point of view, scientific scholars develop a theory to explain the facts (for example, because visible light is a wave, it can create rainbows).And the theory itself can guide the search for new facts. (Can you bend light waves?).Again, the law of increasing returns.Integrating newly discovered facts into a theoretical system makes the theory stronger and more reliable.Occasionally, scientists discover new facts that are not easily explained by theory (light sometimes behaves like particles).These facts are called anomalous events.The original anomaly is brushed aside as new facts consistent with the dominant theory emerge.At some point, it turns out that the accumulated anomalous events are too large, too nuisance, or too numerous to ignore any longer.At this time, some radicals are bound to propose transformative alternative models to explain anomalous events (for example, the wave-particle duality of light).The old theories were swept out and the new ones quickly took over.

According to the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, dominant theories form self-reinforcing minds called paradigms that designate what is fact and what is mere distraction.In this paradigm, anomalies are trivial, outlandish, fanciful, or substandard data.Research programs that endorse exemplary practices receive grants, experimental space, and degree recognition.Research projects that defy the paradigm—those that dabble in scattered trivialities—get nothing.Yet the stories of famous scientists who turned down funding and the trust of the academic community to make great transformative discoveries abound are well-worn.In this book, I quote a few of those clichés to share with you.One example of the neglected work involved was done by scientists with ideas that contradicted the neo-Darwinian dogma.

In his seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Change, Kuhn argued that true discovery in the history of science can only "begin with the understanding of the anomalous." Progress comes from the recognition of opposing opinions.Repressed anomalies (and their discoverers) rise to the throne with counterfactuals, subverting a series of established paradigms.The new theories prevailed, at least for a time, until they themselves became ossified and insensible to new anomalies, and were eventually dethroned themselves. Kuhn's model of paradigm shift in science is so convincing that it becomes a paradigm itself—a paradigm of paradigms.Today, we see examples of paradigms and the overthrow of paradigms everywhere in and outside of science.Paradigm change becomes our paradigm.If things don't really evolve that way, then that fact is an anomaly.

Alan Lightman and Irving Gingorich published the paper "When Do Unusual Things Happen?" in a 1991 issue of Science. claims that, contrary to Kuhn's dominant scientific model, "certain anomalies cannot be accepted unless they are convincingly explained within the framework of new fundamental concepts. Until then, those anomalies The facts of the past were either treated as hypothetical facts or ignored within the old framework.” In other words, the truly anomalous things that ended up subverting the paradigm were not even considered anomalous in the first place.They are ignored.

Based on Letterman and Gingerich's article, here are some short examples to explain "post-identification". The fact that the topography of South America and Africa fit together like a lock and key never bothered geologists before the 1960s.Observations of this phenomenon, as well as observations of mid-ocean ridges, did not bother them or their theory of continental formation.Although this remarkable fit has been noticed since the first time anyone charted the Atlantic Ocean, this existing fact does not even need explanation.It was only later that there was an explanation for this, and everyone recognized this fit after the fact.

Newton made precise measurements of the inertial mass (the internal force that makes things move, like a pendulum starts to reciprocate) and their gravitational mass (how fast they are falling towards the surface) of many objects to determine how these two forces are If they are equal, if they are not equal, they may cancel each other out when doing physical calculations.The relationship between the two has never been questioned for hundreds of years.However, Einstein was amazed that "Newton's laws have no place in the building blocks of the universe." Unlike others, he pursued this and finally succeeded in explaining this phenomenon with the innovative theory of general relativity.

For decades, the near-precise balance between the kinetic and gravitational energy of the universe—the pair of forces that keep the expanding universe balanced between inflation and collapse—astronomers have noticed in passing.However, this phenomenon was never considered a "difficulty" until the revolutionary "inflation of the universe" model in 1981, which made this fact a disturbing paradox.The observation of this balance was not an anomaly at first, and it was not seen as a troublemaker in retrospect until after the paradigm shift. The common theme of the above examples is that in the beginning, abnormal things are just observed facts and need no explanation at all.These facts are not facts that cause trouble, they are just facts.Anomalies are not the cause but the effect of paradigm shifts.

In a letter to Science, David Barash recounted his experience. In his 1982 textbook on the sociology of biology, he wrote that "Evolutionary biologists, since Darwin, have been troubled by the fact that animals often perform seemingly altruistic behaviors, often at great expense to themselves. In 1964, William Hamilton pioneered biosociology with a publication that included a theory of fitness. His theory provided a practical, albeit controversial, way to explain altruistic behavior in animals," writes Barash , "Inspired by the Letterman-Gingerich paper, I then reviewed a large number of pre-1964 textbooks on animal behavior and evolutionary biology and found that, in fact—and the assertion I cited above (Biology Annoyance to family) On the contrary - before Hamilton's epiphany, the apparent altruistic behavior in animals did not bother evolutionary biologists (at least they did not invest much energy in theoretical inquiry or experimental investigation of this phenomenon) ” He in The letter ends with a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that biologists “come and teach us a lesson about things we don’t understand, like animal behavior.”