Important Lessons We Learned Through Record Experiments
On the Big Think website, Michael Strevens has outlined some ideas from his recent book about how science advances.
I stumbled upon Strevens through Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Podcast. Shermer and his professor guest discuss at length (about an hour and a half) his singular insight that trying to understand and promulgate a Big Picture of Reality is what kept the scientists of the past (they used to call themselves natural philosophers) for hundreds of years from actually making the breakthroughs necessary to come up with one.
What was needed was data, and lots of it, with no concern for theories of any kind, elegant, inelegant or otherwise.
Here is the link to the podcast, which we feel is well worth your time if a deeper understanding of how we gain knowledge is a subject that interests you.
Some of the key takeaways from the book:
- Modern science requires scrutinizing the tiniest of details and an almost irrational dedication to empirical observation.
- Many scientists believe that theories should be “beautiful,” but such argumentation is forbidden in modern science.
- Neglecting beauty would be a step too far for Aristotle.
My heart raced a bit when I read the line “an almost irrational dedication to empirical observation.”
This describes our obsession with finding the best sounding pressings of our favorite music better than any seven words I’ve ever come up with, that’s for sure. If only I were a better writer!
However, I did have some skills to bring to bear on the problems I was trying to solve, the most important of which was the fact that I was a naturally a skeptic.