On the Practice of Science (aka a Scientist’s view of science) - Part 2

Human Limits

“You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.”
― Kathryn Davis

Above is not the quote I was looking for but it fits this section just as well. Before we get into the nitty gritty of how one does science, it is important to note that science is a human enterprise. While we like to talk about Science (with a capital "S") as if it was a single monolithic entity behaving like a hive mind, we cannot forget that the day-to-day practice of science is done by individual scientists either alone, or more commonly working together in groups of a few dozen. And humans have real physical limits. While the exact figure is still unknown a single human mind contains only on the order of 100 billion neurons (10¹¹) and 100 trillion (10¹⁴) synapses, which might sound like a lot but considering there are roughly 300 billion stars in just our galaxy and 10²² molecules in one milliliter of water this is definitely insufficient to hold a full understanding of the world. Even just restricting ourselves to known scientific knowledge it is now impossible for a single person to have read all the observations and findings even in just their field. PubMed which only tracks a subset of scientific papers currently contains almost 23 million abstracts and is estimated to add a new one every minute.

Beyond just the sheer amount of stuff in the world science aspires to learn about, there is also myriad ways of observing and describing all of this stuff. For instance, consider a single leaf what properties might we be interested in? its shape, its roughness, whether it has hairs covering it, its size, its colour, the texture of the surface, the length of the stem, the pattern of the veins, its temperature, its elemental composition, its weight, its water content, the rate of evaporation from it, its aerodynamics, its flexibility, its resistance to puncture, how it tastes, what plant it came from, how old it is, what time of year it was collected, etc.... Again we see the possibilities are much larger than can be considered in any reasonable way by a single person.

This leads us nicely to what Kuhn calls "a paradigm". I dislike this term because it is used inconsistently in Kuhn's book to refer to various things and does not really express what I want to discuss. Instead, I shall discuss it as a "model of reality". This model will decide which characteristics of reality are considered most informative to how the world works (aka most useful for predicting outcomes) and which characteristics are less important and can be ignored. A model of reality will also influence what questions scientists consider meaningful and useful to investigate. Thus providing a much needed filter on the immensity and complexity of reality.

Each scientific discipline has a core model of reality, considered to be the current "best" or "closest" to true reality (more on why that is later), which is taught to young scientists as part of their training and is internalized into a framework for their thinking about the world. However, models of reality are not static and as each scientist explores the world through their own research and experience their model of reality changes such that each will have slightly differing models of reality.  One way this can be seen is the gradual shift (or on occaison sudden jumps) of a scientists research interests throughout their career. A scientists model of reality informs how they go about the day-to-day business of science and will spill over into their understanding of their daily lives. The similarity between scientists' models of reality results in the impression of Science, the monolithic super-mind, and allows people to talk about what "science says".

Part 1
Part 3
Part 4