The Ideal of the Noble Scientist

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Magical Realist, May 29, 2015.

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  1. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes...people are born with and cultivate their creativity from childhood. It isn't "learned" at school. Einstein said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." It's something inherent to the person, not something achieved thru scholarship. And it's definitely not something granted by some method.
     
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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    It is indeed learned through scholarship. You can have the desire to create from childhood, and the imagination to match. But without education, that desire to create and imagination will be confined to Legos and paper dolls.
     
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  5. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Right..education is necessary in science. I never said otherwise. But it's not the source of imagination, which is what drives scientific discovery.
     
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  7. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. Any decent scientist needs both.
     
  8. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    The idea of the "noble scientist" is no more or less valid than the idea of the "noble ghost hunter" or "noble paranormal expert" - they are all, ultimately, in it for some sort of gratification... often of the monetary or ego varieties...
     
  9. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    I remember being asked to develop an in situ bio-denitrification process that needed to be done in open waste nitric acid ponds. I had never taken a single biology course, but because I was innovative, I was asked to do what was considered impossible by the expert consultants. There would be little control over a lot of parameters, such as doing an anaerobic reaction in an open basin, nitrates that were an order of magnitude too high, no pH control, etc.

    In my case, ignorance was bliss, because I was not biased by the biology and bio-reactor traditions. I look at bacteria as little bugs, which seemed to like me. We made it work on a 2 million gallon pilot test.

    Sometimes knowing too much, limits your imagination. In my experience, there is a certain intermediate level of knowledge that is optimized for innovation. You need enough to proceed but not so much you are handcuffed.
     
  10. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Er, well, fluxions and calculus is maths rather than science, so I think we should leave that on one side.

    But I do agree that the so-called "scientific method" is not any kind of set process that scientists consciously follow. I completed a 4 year degree at Oxford in chemistry without it ever being referred to once. It seems to me the term is really one used by philosophers of science, to describe how the scientific enterprise progresses overall, over time, rather than being any kind of "technique" that all scientists are in some way trained to use.

    But it is most certainly, I think, the case that all science involves - at some level - a feedback loop between hypothesis and observation, whereby observations give rise to hypotheses and these are then tested by further observation, even if an individual scientist may only take part in one side of the process. At Oxford for example there is a department of theoretical chemistry, inhabited by people who are virtually mathematicians and have probably not held a test tube for years, while across the road are people who spend their lives synthesising novel molecules, drawing on a body of theory that they never really question.
     
  11. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    In fact, philosophers of science (at least some) are aware of this. In Popper's logic of scientific discovery, the problem how to find a new scientific theory is not considered at all. Instead, it is made quite explicit that how one finds new theories does not matter at all. So, the book is about the evaluation of theories which some unspecified people have invented out of unspecified reasons, possibly simply out of thin air.

    A feedback loop - yes, but a more subtle one.

    There is theory, and there is observation. Then, there is, possibly, a conflict between theory and observation: Predictions of the theory do not agree with observation.

    Such conflicts are the point where the theoretician starts to think. And tries to develop a new theory which predicts what was really observed - as a replacement for the existing one. Thus, only if experimenters find observations which contradict existing theories, they are of value for theoreticians. Experiments supporting the predictions of existing theories are uninteresting. They may be, technically, phantastic results, possibly the most accurate measurements human beings have ever made, but cannot give any rise to any new hypotheses. Instead, quite inaccurate measurements which scientists have made at their home in Galileo's time or so have caused scientific revolutions.
     
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    When one looks at physics as professional physicists practice it, it's almost entirely differential equations. So inventing that formal language, and pioneering the conceptualization of physical problems in those terms, would seem to have been a crucial formative event in the history of physics. The subsequent work of people like Hamilton and Lagrange wouldn't have been possible without it. My point was that that it doesn't seem to conform very well to the secondary-school stereotype of "the Scientific Method" as hypothesis-testing.

    My larger point was that much of what many indisputable scientists spend their time doing isn't hypothesis-testing either. They explore and attempt to gather new data, they subject that data to analytical procedures in hopes of extracting valuable information from it, they maintain collections and create catalogs and taxonomic keys, they review each others work, they try to create mathematical models, they try to perfect their own laboratory procedures in hopes of coaxing more reliability and accuracy out of them.

    I'm not convinced that it succeeds in explaining why the 17th century 'Scientific Revolution' was so remarkably successful. Nor does it provide the definitive criterion for what 'science', 'scientist' and 'the practice of science' mean. It isn't a satisfactory stand-alone demarcation-criterion for distinguishing science and pseudo-science either. It certainly isn't lightening that can be captured in a bottle, a virtually perfect intellectual process that can be extracted from the Scientific Revolution and then applied to all of the rest of human life, with miraculous results.

    Sure, but so does cooking and pottery-making, along with many other human activities. I expect that the invention of tools and the taming of fire back in the old stone age involved a similar trial-and-error feed-back loop between thinking and behavior. 'Maybe this will work...' In other words, it's nothing unique to or definitive of science. It's something that's been generally apparent in human cognition since its beginning. So there's no reason to refer to it as 'the Scientific Method'. Continuing to do so will probably be misleading.
     
  13. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Who said they were lying? Why can't they just be mistaken?
    Why do you decide George is right when he says Jim is wrong? Is it just because you have an axe to grind with Jim?
     
  14. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Before you can think outside the box effectively, you have to understand the box. As Edison said, it's mostly just hard work. There are no shortcuts.
     
  15. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    Got to agree with all that, sideshowbob.

    It is quite ironic though, that the ones who have only utilized "shortcuts" often seem to consider themselves the "foremost authority" on most everything Science related...after a cursory reading of just a few "Pop-Science" books.
     
  16. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I'm pretty sure the revolutionaries of science understood all too well the box of traditional science they broke out of. Who in fact would understand it better than those who sensed an outside to it? Einstein was well versed in Newtonian physics I'm sure. And Bohm understood the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics. But I don't think it's accurate to say their thinking outside the box resulted from their hard work inside the box. I think it came from being imaginative and being inspired by new ideas.
     
    Last edited: May 30, 2015
  17. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    MR, if all it took was 'imagination' and 'inspiration'...then Human Beings would probably have "learned to fly" before coming down out of the trees.

    When these fellows were trying to come up with a Water Displacing Lubricant - do you suppose that they failed to work hard on their first 39 formulas - prior to getting to WD40 ?

    Do you suppose that Heinz was not working hard on the first 56 formulas - prior to cooking up the 57th ?

    I have, over my decades of doing time on this globe, heard differing "adages/proverbs/quotes" along the lines of :
    Genius/Invention/etc...is one part 'inspiration' and 2/3/4/...99, on up parts PERSPIRATION.

    MR, you know all of this, though...so...
     
  18. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes..I'm aware of the virtue of industriousness and perseverence in succeeding in any field of study. But that's no guarantee that you will come up with a revolutionary new approach to the problem. That takes imagination and the courage to explore ideas outside of the conventional wisdom on the matter. More often than not becoming really knowledgable in one area blinds you to the possibilities of novel innovations and ideas in that area. That's why we always welcome fresh eyes on a problem, minds unshackled by the habitual and often unconscious assumptions that come from long hours of studying it.
     
  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    No real scientist is "shackled"as you put it and certainly do explore ideas outside of conventional wisdom.
    Einstein's quote in its full context are as follows:
    "At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact, I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research".
    Einstein intuitively knew he was correct due to his knowledge in that area of expertise. Einstein with his statement, was simply enforcing the point that "Imagination" went hand in hand with "Knowledge" and that one is as important as the other.
    What is certain is that imagination is obtained due to the knowledge and experience we gain in our daily lives.
    And that same knowledge and experience is the basis of the scientific method...in other words based on logic and common sense.
    But one must also be able to realise that at times, what their imagination reveals to them, may not be real when applied to the world and the Universe around them.
    And in that respect they must be able to deduce that sometimes a path their imagination may be leading them to, is totally without context. They need to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff which a few here are unable to do.
     
    Last edited: May 30, 2015
  20. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    That's not what he said. He said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. " I'm pretty sure he meant exactly what he said and doesn't need your ad hoc paraphrase of it.

    "Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
    Albert Einstein
     
  21. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Re yr 1st point, nobody disputes that mathematics is an essential tool for much of the theory of science. But that is not at all the same thing as saying (wrongly) that maths is science or science is maths. Maths is simply a quantitative branch of logic. It exists without any reference to observation of the physical world whatsoever. Whereas science - all science, even the most theoretical - is rooted in accounting for and predicting observations of the physical world. That is the key difference.

    And, to the extent that cooking and pottery involve a feedback loop between theory and observation those disciplines involve an element of science. I have a book on the science of cooking. Science is not just an ivory tower activity practised by men in white coats (though many chefs do in fact wear white coats, as it happens). It's a very simple empirical activity with no mystique at all. What gives it its authority is the insistence that any hypothesis has to be supported by observation and has to be able to predict further observations successfully.

    The scientific revolution after the Renaissance arose when people began insisting on this observational feedback loop, instead of judging ideas by their correspondence to theological or abstract philosophical ideals.
     
  22. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    MR, most of us have read and understand exactly what Albert Einstein said and, indeed, meant.
    Most of us have no problem accepting exactly what Albert Einstein said and meant.

    MR, you know exactly what Albert Einstein said and meant...
     
  23. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes..and I know he didn't mean what paddoboy said he meant.
     
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