Monthly Archive for November, 2010

From John Leslie, The Sunday Times

Why is there a universe, not a blank? The Grand Design and Cycles of Time suggest very different answers. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow make The Grand Design reader-friendly. Its physics and cosmology are enlivened by myth (“In the Mayan legend the Maker, unhappy because there was no one to praise him, decided to create humans”). You’ll find colourful artwork, jokes, a quick history of science, no mathematics. And the book can seem astonishingly open-minded. Even Archbishop Ussher’s view that things began in 4004 BC appears to get considerable respect. Suppose that Ussher’s modern disciples taught that in 4004 BC God created the universe exactly as if it had existed for billions of years, inclusive of fossils in the rocks: Hawking–Mlodinow’s “model-dependent realism” wouldn’t call their teaching mistaken, or its imagined facts “less real” than those you presumably believe in.

“Philosophy”, the book declares, “is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science.” The authors then make bold philosophical claims. For example they aren’t attracted by the idea, perhaps it has never occurred to them, that even chess-playing computers “make choices” in a sense. So they theorize that “though we feel that we can choose what we do”, we are in fact “governed by the laws of physics and chemistry”, which at once proves we can’t. Presumably, they hope that after weighing the alternatives we will select their theory without actually choosing it.

Again, Hawking and Mlodinow treat quantum theory controversially. What could terminate “quantum superpositions” in which seemingly contradictory situations are combined? For instance a cat – anaesthetized, observing nothing, its fate linked to an atom liable to decay radioactively – with the seemingly incompatible properties of being alive and being dead. Or an electron’s passage through a left slit, as a particle, and simultaneously through a right slit, once again as a particle, and simultaneously also through both slits, as a wave. Only observations could have the power to terminate such paradoxical states, on the book’s world-view: “the unobserved past is indefinite”. That’s philosophically bold. Cannot photographic film record how superpositions have “collapsed” into unparadoxical realities long before the film is developed and observed? And how about our efforts to build quantum computers in which superpositions perform complex calculations? Aren’t we seemingly thwarted by how the superpositions keep collapsing before we look at them?

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From Alice Bell,

Every now and again, the term “scientific literacy” gets wheeled out and I roll my eyes. This post is an attempt to explain why.

The argument for greater scientific literacy is that to meaningfully participate, appreciate and even survive our modern lives, we all need certain knowledge and skills about science and technology. Ok. But what will this look like exactly, how will you know what we all need to know in advance and how on earth do you expect to get people trained up? These are serious problems.

Back in the early 1990s, Jon Durant very usefully outlined out the three main types of scientific literacy. This is probably as good a place to start as any:

• Knowing some science – For example, having A-level biology, or simply knowing the laws of thermodynamics, the boiling point of water, what surface tension is, that the Earth goes around the Sun, etc.
• Knowing how science works – This is more a matter of knowing a little of the philosophy of science (e.g. ‘The Scientific Method’, a matter of studying the work of Popper, Lakatos or Bacon).

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