Chapter 102 Chapter 18 The Magician and the Apprentice: Schools of Natural Science 4

4 Do the fluctuations in the temperature of politics and consciousness affect the progress of natural science?Compared with the social and humanities—not to mention conscious thought and philosophy itself—the answer is that there are far fewer.The natural science's reflection of the scientist's time can only be shown within the confines of the empiricist methodology; and this method must become the standard law of an epistemologically uncertain age.That is, the hypothesis that can be proved to be "infallible" through actual verification—or to borrow what the British philosopher Popper (Karl Popper, 1902) said, or many scientists also have their own version of the same statement—can be verified through actual verification. "wrong" hypothesis.Therefore, certain restrictions have been added to the direction of "consciousness" of science.This is not the case with economics, which, while also subject to conditions of logic and coherence, has developed into some form of theological status—in the Western world, perhaps more prominently.Perhaps it is precisely because economics, as a thing, can—and has always been—free from this kind of hypothesis-testing, whereas physics cannot.Therefore, the contradictions of schools of thought on economics and the change of ethos can easily be used to reflect the evolution of contemporary experience and ideological trends.But astrocosmology, which belongs to the natural sciences, does not have this ability.

After all, however, science is somewhat reflective of its time, although it is undeniable that some major scientific advances have taken place entirely from within and have nothing to do with the outside world.Inevitably, therefore, it is no wonder that theoreticians, seeing the random Big Bang of members of the subatomic family of particles, especially after their accelerated appearance in the 1950s, were compelled to seek a way to simplify.The properties of this hypothetical new "ultimate" particle, consisting of protons, electrons, neutrons, and all other "sons," are (in the beginning) determined by accident, as can be seen from its name: quark, 1963) - originally taken from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.Soon, the quark family was also divided into 3 (or 4) subfamilies - each with its own "anti-quarks" (anti-quarks) members - respectively "up", "down", "odd", It is called "charm" (editor's note: now two kinds of "bottom" and "top" have been discovered).There is also a group of quarks that lead the "charm" (charm, note: one of the quark qualities), and each member has an individual "colour" (note: another quark quality) as a characteristic.These words are completely different from their usual meanings.So as in other examples, scientists have successfully made speculations based on this theory; at the same time, they have concealed another fact, that is, the existence of any of the above quarks has not been found in the 1990s.Do these new developments simplify the original atomic maze, or add a layer of bewildering complexity to it?This question must be determined by a qualified physicist.But while we skeptical laymen are envious, we have to think of the lessons learned in the late 19th century.How much energy was spent in the hopeless pursuit to maintain the inexplicable belief in "aether" (aether) in the scientific community.It was not until Planck and Einstein's research came out that this scientific myth was broken, and it was exiled to the museum of "false theory" together with "phlogiston" (see Chapter 10 of "The Age of Empires").

Theoretical formations are so disconnected from the reality they attempt to explain (unless their purpose is to disprove a hypothesis) that they leave their doors open to the influence of the outside world.In a century dominated by technology, doesn't the mechanical analogy come in again?It’s just that the analogy this time is based on the contrast between animals and machines in terms of communication and control technology. In 1940, there were some theories that came out under various names—such as cybernetics, system General systems theory, information theory, etc.Since World War II, especially after the invention of the transistor—that is, electronic computers, which have developed at an astonishing speed, have a high degree of analog capability.Therefore, it has always been regarded as the physical and mental action categories of organisms (including human beings), and now it is very easy to develop mechanical models to simulate them. Scientists in the late 20th century talked about the human brain as if it were fundamentally an information-processing system.And one of the most familiar themes of debate in the second half of this century is whether there is a difference between "human intelligence" and "artificial intelligence"?If the answer is yes, what is the difference?All in all, which part of the human brain cannot be programmed in a computer theoretically?There is no doubt that the emergence of this type of technological model has accelerated the progress of research.What could the study of the human nervous system—that is, the science of electric nerve impulses—be accomplished without the impetus of electronic research?But in the final analysis, these analogies belong to the "reductive simplification"' (redUCtiorllst) point of view.One day in the future, in the eyes of future generations, I am afraid that what we see today will be as simple and crude as a set of levers used to describe human actions in the 18th century.

Certain analogies do help in the establishment of specific patterns.But beyond this category, scientists' personal life experience will inevitably affect their way of viewing nature.Our century—to borrow the words of one scientist looking back on another's life—is a century of "simultaneous gradual and sudden changes pervading human experience" (Steve Jones, 1992, p. 12).That being the case, of course science cannot escape this "robbery". In the era of bourgeois progress and transformation in the 19th century, the paradigm of science (paradigm) was grasped by continuity and gradual progress, and no matter what the natural driving force was, it could not jump arbitrarily.The geological changes and the evolution of life on the earth's surface are not taking earth-shattering strides forward, but changing step by step step by step.Even the seemingly distant future, the conceivable end of the universe, will gradually and slowly come to an end.According to the second law of thermodynamics, little by little, although imperceptible, but eventually inevitable, "energy" will be converted into "heat", that is, the theory of 'heat death of the universe' ). But the world view of science in the 20th century has developed a completely different picture.

According to this new view, our universe was created by a giant explosion 15 million years ago.Moreover, according to the celestial inferences at the time of writing this book, when the universe is destroyed, it must also perish in the same vigorous form.In this universe, the life history of planets, including the history of many planets, is also like the universe, full of earth-shattering chaos like a flood: nova, supernova, big red giant star, white dwarf star, black hole And so on, all kinds of tricks—all these things, before the 1920s, were at most classified as peripheral astronomical phenomena.Most geologists have long resisted the idea of ​​large-scale lateral movement of land masses, such as continents drifting across the Earth's surface throughout Earth's history, although the evidence for this is overwhelming.The reasons for their opposition are mostly based on their ideological standpoint, as can be seen from the controversy encountered by Alfred Wegener, the leader of the "land drift theory".Opponents say it's impossible, because no geophysical mechanism exists to cause this movement.But their claim, as far as the actual evidence is concerned, is at best an a priori assumption, just as Lord Kelvin argued in the 19th century that the earth's timetable proposed by geologists at that time must be wrong.Because according to the physical knowledge at that time, the age of the earth was estimated to be much younger than that required by geology.But since the 1960s, the previously unimaginable conjecture has become the common sense orthodoxy of geology, that is, global movement, and sometimes even the rapid drift of giant plates - the theory of "plate tectonics".

More importantly, perhaps the "direct catastrophe theory" since the 1960s has returned to the door of geology and evolutionary theory through paleontology.This time, this new evidence that seems to be "seen at first" is actually already familiar to everyone. Every child knows that dinosaurs became extinct on the earth during the Cretaceous period.Because in the past, Darwin's teachings were so pervasive that, according to him, biological evolution was regarded as a slow and subtle gradual process that continued throughout geological history, rather than as a sudden change (or creation) result.As a result, such as the extinction of dinosaurs, which is obviously a phenomenon of biological catastrophe, rarely attracts people's attention.Anyway, the geological timeline must be long enough for any visible evolutionary outcome to take place.It is not surprising, then, that in this era of dramatic change in human history, the phenomenon of evolutionary hiatus is being reemphasized.We could go a step further and say that, at the time of this writing, the mechanism most favored by geology and paleontology catastrophe scholars is a sudden outer space attack, in which the Earth collides with one or more large meteorites.By some calculations, certain space travellers, large enough to destroy civilization—that is, the equivalent of 8 million Hiroshima bombs—visit Earth every 300,000 years.This kind of plot has always been a part of remote prehistory. Before the era of nuclear war, which serious scientist would take a look at it?The theory of a "punctuated equilibrium" in which evolution is slow, interrupted by rather sudden changes from time to time, although still controversial in the 1990s, has become a topic of intense debate within the scientific community one of them.Once again, while we are laymen watching, we have to notice that in the field farthest from ordinary human thought, two major sub-branches of mathematics have emerged in recent years: the "catastrophe theory" that appeared in the 1960s, And the "chaos theory" that came out in the 1980s.The former belongs to a branch of "topology" first developed in France in the 1960s, advocating the exploration of sudden breaks caused by gradual changes—that is, what is the correlation between continuity and discontinuity.The latter is a new doctrine originating in the United States, based on a model of uncertainty and unpredictability in the course of events.That is, an apparently small event (such as the flapping of a butterfly's wings) can have huge consequences locally (causing a hurricane).Anyone who has experienced the turmoil in the last few decades of this century should understand why such images of chaos and catastrophe also enter the minds of scientists and mathematicians.