Her: Curiosity on Mars

You may or may not know that the new rover Curiosity presently boldly rumbling over the surface of Mars has a twitter feed.

Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity

Going the Distance (not necessarily going for speed). Over the last three sols, I've driven 226 feet (about 69 meters) #MSL

I can't really think of any scientific entity or advance that has been given a personality (or, in fact, a gender) before, and it certainly seems to be compelling. This BBC video meets the team behind the tweets, although you may not want to ruin the magic.

Mission Creep: Baggini vs. Krauss

The Guardian newspaper hosts an exchange of ideas between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss about science's so-called mission creep into other fields including, but not limited to, philosophy.

While he seems quite happy with science, Baggini picks up on whether science is capable of fully answering moral questions, giving a compelling example of the claims concerning the (and he quotation marks them as well) evolutionary benefits and biological basis of rape which is generally considered to be barbarous. Baggini points out that there is something non-scientific and measureable about the moral condemnations of certain activities and also the occurance of (maybe more positive) others.

Krauss, on the other hand, argues that facts of a scientific nature should and do form the basis of moral decisions, and argues that in order for science not to apply in a situation involving something extraordinary as self-sacrifice, "there would have to be something beyond the purely 'physical' that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case." He concludes by saying that there may be areas where science falls down, but that these particular areas will not be known until science has tried to explain everything.

I don't get along particularly well with philosophy. A lot of the time it seems to hinge rather tenuously on the definition of a word, an initial assumption or to completely lose track of its point completely and, like a Simpsons episode, end up in a place totally unrecogniseable from where it started out.

On the other hand, I'm not a scientist and I took enough political science courses to come to the conclusion that attempting to explain human-scale activities using social scientific theory is almost always absurd. It's much worse when someone comes to the conclusion that a particular theory should guide the future and we should all start living by an idea cooked up in a booth in a Manchester bar.  (I don't have anything in for that particular theory above others and get that we have to have ideas in order to make attempts to improve but you get the idea in a casual sense).

Social scientific theories, however, are always quite falsifiable (and old but relatively reliable way of discounting a scientific idea as completely accurate) and usually falsified. Ask a physicist if he or she thinks that political science deserves the name 'science' as we understand it today, and the answer is almost certainly 'no'. Not to say that political science and the humanities aren't valuable, however.

I think this is why most sensible discussions of this kind end up talking about brain chemistry and "the illusion of" free will. Using brain chemistry, we can or very well may be able to explain an individual human, say some scientists. Ultimately, this could mean that we could explain humanity and morality (whether such a thing is practical or not).

This is when I run into trouble and it's not because I think that there is something about humans that is not measureable by science in some respect. Complexity of modelling such an unimaginably enormous system usefully aside, I'm concerned that looking at people as individuals doesn't always translate into looking at people in a society in a reasonable way. This doesn't mean it's not possible, but it does mean that even small unpredictable and unreasonable events in the chemistry and physics of a person could actually have enormous and counter-scientific ramifications in the world.

I think that boils down to me finding myself partway between Krauss and Beggini's agreement to almost agree, but with no actual evidence for my argument. I think my lack of evidence for my argument says it all.

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On a note I will probably come back to later, in terms of actually investigation of philosophy vs. science I still think that philosophy (and political 'science', social 'science' etc.) is useful even if science can ultimately explain 'everything' (whatever that means) just as biology is still useful even though physics could be used to explain it.

Book Review: The Battery

The full title of this book by Henry Schlesinger is The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution. It simply tells the story of the invention and use of the battery throughout history.

‘Simply’ is the right term, but it’s not at all a bad thing. Aside from the title, this book has no pretentions to grandeur. It takes a small thing that we all rely on and tells its story through the much more well-known, more beloved, more written about story of the objects it powers. A single battery itself takes pride of place on the cover, humbly noble.  

Voltaic Pile: the first battery

Until reading this book, my knowledge of the history of electricity was focused on current. The bulky, very basic battery only starts in the spotlight early on before being shunted out in the Edison and Tesla years by current. The otherwise lovely BBC Story of Electricity (which I have mentioned before) does just this, leaving the battery in the dust after the first episode.

The book captures this in a quote from Edison, when he was investigating the use of the battery for powering the new electric lighting:

“The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catch penny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies.” (pg 144)

But the battery didn’t die out and disappear, even for Edison himself. A relatively simple technology that hasn’t changed dramatically over the years, the battery’s been a necessary little (semi-)portable powerhouse in continuous and heavy use since it was invented. Schlesinger describes batteries powering theatre and party lights, early and later telegraphs, ticker tape machines, telephones, farmhouse and army radios, doorbells, flashlights, even the famous green light on the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby… they made these early electric objects possible for a majority of people before current was common and widespread. Of course, they remain crucial to our lives—and in some ways their uses remain almost unchanged.

The much-less messy dry cell batteries "for telephone service".

Some of the most fascinating things that captured my interest were the importance of “unwieldy” maintenance of early wet home batteries, the use of small amounts of electricity in favour of large amounts and the myriad of tiny devices built around, not the existence of electricity itself, but the battery specifically—not to mention the scientific advances made possible by the battery. The book itself makes a good case (although not explicitly) for the powerful technological determinism of the battery—the battery guiding the creation of a certain world, rather than being pressed into service by the march of progress.

The way Schlesinger’s clear, well-written and constructed book presents it, the battery is the Frodo of the electric world. Small and frequently low-powered compared to others, but highly determined and usually portable, it can accomplish a lot for little input.

Noble battery, we salute you.   

Ps. The book is available for your electronic book, so you can read it using your own battery!

The Orrery

I am interested in ways people model the universe on the large or small scale. This is very much a developing interest for me—mostly still in the stages of understanding how people model things rather than what they say about the ways we think about the universe (although that’s where I’d like to end up).

An orrery clock in the British Museum

One object I really love is the Orrery. An orrery is a model, usually movable or even mechanical, of the solar system. Orrerys are often objects of beauty and that’s why they attract me; I am sure I am not the only one to find them initially interesting for purely aesthetic reasons.

My research, if you can call it that, about the orrery threw up something interesting. The geocentric model of the universe, which preceded Copernicus’ modern heliocentric model of the universe, would have made a more complicated orrery, particularly with epicycles to account for certain stubborn planets’ retrograde (backwards) motion.

Since an orrery is a fairly obvious thing to make, perhaps that’s why the three dimensional model of the universe did not really exist in the modern world until after the heliocentric model was widely accepted. It is easy to put a sun in the centre and then a series of concentric circles outside it.

According to this Whipple Museum web page,

London clock- and instrument-maker George Graham (circa 1674-1751), worked with Thomas Tompion (active 1671-1703), to create a number of particularly finely made heliocentric (sun-centred) models. These can be viewed as the predecessors of the orrery.

 The orrery gets its name from a man called Charles Boyle, the 4th Earl of Orrery, who was made an early orrery by "celebrated instrument maker" John Rowley as a gift for his son (the 5th Earl of Orrery), making the Earls part of the long list of non- and semi-scientists whose interest in science has nevertheless been enough to be significant (albeit in a small way).

Astronomy was fashionable and the orrery took off in the 18th century, ostensibly as a teaching tool. Beautifully made, they were no doubt also something you showed off to your friends as a status symbol of your scientific interest. This role of the orrery is captured in the famous painting by Joseph Wright, A Philosopher giving a lecture on the orrery, in which a lamp is place in the position of the sun. 

   
Wikipedia observes that not only is this painting lovely, it is perhaps significant that the people's faces are seen in various phases (as in the moon), from full to crescent to new. I'll buy that. It would be fun to recreate this photo in a modern setting.

There are lots of orreries around. There is one at the History of Science Museum in Oxford and at least one more at the British Museum. There is clearly one at the Whipple Museum in Cambridge. There is an enormous one featured in the BBC made-for-tv movie Einstein and Eddington (its subject matter rather obvious) and they've appeared in a number of other stories. People do love there and can you blame them? They are compelling. Every teacher who has created a walking solar system using pupils and a variety of balls from the store cupboard knows that they are useful tools.

You can tell from the Wright painting that getting down to the level of the orrery is important and I think that "getting inside" may be a theme of modeling the universe. We are of course in the solar system and we can draw the solar system on a piece of paper, but what we really want to do is to bring the scales into a manageable size. But I think actually what the real delight is is actually the reverse: our heads down close to the orrery, we are actually attempting to experience the solar system as if we are solar-system-sized. Instead of being minute in comparison, we are collosal and all-powerful.

World's First Colour Moving Picture

1902!

What is fascinating about this is when they say that the projection system didn't work properly, so it was considered a failure. But the system works! The pictures were recorded! Incredible.

The New Experimentalists (and Deborah Mayo)

On Sunday, I chickened out of describing the New Experimentalists’ philosophy of science because I actually couldn’t remember very much of what it entailed. I promised myself I would come back to it and so here I am, exploring New Experimentalism.

This blog post is a bit silly because instead of starting at the beginning I’m actually describing here a recent addition to the philosophy of science. It’s also not very well sourced. Most of my understanding, in broad strokes, comes from Alan Chalmers’ What is This Thing Called Science?

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Part of the problem with anything called “New” is that there is necessarily an old which probably needs to be understood before the new can be understood. In her 1994 paper which coined the name ‘New Experimentalist’ Deborah Mayo writes…

“[New Experimentalists] hope is to find ways to steer a path between the old logical empiricism, where observations were deemed relatively unproblematic, and the more pessimistic post-Kuhnians, who take the failure of logical empiricist models of appraisal as leading to underdetermination and holistic theory change, if not to denying outright the role of evidence in constraining appraisal”

Mayo, 1994

In a nutshell, the story of the Philosophy of Science (as I roughly understand it) goes like this: In the beginning, things were relatively straightforward. Scientists were thought to undertake experimentation which led to facts that joined together to make theories (inductive reasoning).

Thomas Kuhn, Science Philosopher

But then philosophers thought some more and started getting worried. Surely theory plays a part in the way that scientists see the world and which experiments they choose to carry out and how they carry them out. The interpretation of the results of experiment also relies on theory as scientists have to determine what results of an experiment are valuable and significant and they can often use their theoretical understanding to help them with this.  

Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a significant marker in this change from a focus on experiment to one on theory theory. One of the ideas that made sense to me that I think comes from Kuhn is that aliens or other extra-theory people conducting the same experiments or viewing the same results might actually produce an understanding of the world very different from our own. There is nothing, argued these people, particularly definitive about experiment.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, things got crazy. Experiment was dependent on theory which was clearly almost always wrong. People like Paul Feyerabend took this to extremes, eventually arguing that since theory was always wrong and experiments were dependent on theory, very little about science could be said to be more correct than it had been before. In short, science was paddling around in circles.

I don’t know for sure, but I get the sense that Feyerabend’s ideas were the trigger for everyone else to go, “Hold on a sec.” Enter the New Experimentalists who, according to Mayo’s footnotes, were writing in the 80s.

I’ve linked Deborah Mayo and New Experimentalists together, but in fact her 1994 paper actually attempts to fix some of the problems which she perceives to be part of the ideas of what she dubs the New Experimentalist movement. I will come back to those at the end.

At the beginning of the 1994 paper linked above, Mayo invokes an ‘apt slogan’ to explain the New Experimentalists that was used by New Experimentalist Ian Hacking in a 1983 paper: “Experiments have a life of their own”. This of course stands in opposition to earlier theories where experimentation was theory dominated.

She articulates three ways of interpreting this slogan, which I’ve summarized…

1. Much of experimentation is “local” to a specific problem, focusing on extracting results from background noise, for example, and bears little reference to theory.
2. If you are making up a philosophy of experimental science, “it cannot make the very concept of observation become suspect.” (Hacking again)
3. The results of experiment are not only valuable within the theory they were created in. After Newtonian physics fell, observations made under it were still valid and a new theory or theories had to take most of those observations into account.

Relieved experimenters (Clipart: Philip Martin)

New Experimentalism put experiment back into philosophy of science, which must have been a big relief to those people carrying out experiments.

Mayo goes on to discuss a problem with this new idea-- that this is all well and good, but the myriad possible errors of observation, perception and the evaluation of what the results actually are still pose a problem between the carrying out of experiments and the induction of fact.

For me, it is easier to understand Chalmers on Mayo than Mayo explaining herself. He describes Mayo thus:

“A key idea underlying her treatment is that a claim can only be said to be supported by experiment if the various ways in which the claim could be at fault have been investigated and eliminated. A claim can only be said to be borne out by experiment if it has been severely tested be experiment, and a severe test of a claim, as usefully construed by Mayo, must be such that the claim would be unlikely to pass it if it were false.” (pg 202)

She articulates how this might be done although it does appear that each individual experimental case might require a specific assessment of what the possible sources of error could be and then a specific elimination of each possible error, much like making up the dreaded, ‘risk assessment’ before going on a field trip (my words not theirs).

All in all, New Experimentalists allow for science to include facts known to a high level of probability and for those facts to be added to: it can be both (relatively) correct and progressive, which I think is a win for science.

Book Review: What is This Thing Called Science?

Scrubs' J.D. wonders "What is This Thing Called Science?"

So my excuse for the long break, or most of it, is moving house and having a broken computer fan. I am now moved (for now) and my computer is back, so here's something to be going along with.

I'm always reading something on the History of Science, often more than one something. A few weeks ago I finished a book charmingly named What is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers. I feel the title should always been said with a finger on the chin and a quizzical look. 

It was quite a charming read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Essentially, it's a play-by-play of (some?) of the important various philosophies of science over the 20th century. I had encountered Thomas Kuhn and the interestingly anarchic Paul Feyerabend before, but not people like Imre Lakatos. Chalmers details the ideas, decides how they are useful, helpful and flawed before moving on to the next thing. He finally settles, albeit slightly uncomfortably, on Deborah Mayo and the idea of New Experimentalism.

I'm afraid I will need to come back to New Experimentalism and Mayo, although the major key to the philosophy is there in the name-- science is something heavily connected to experiment... and that's the best I've got at the moment. One thing that Chalmers does do is try to battle his way out of the idea that Feyerabend put forth-- that science is not progressive or produces results any more accurate than reading the entrails of unfortunate goats. Throughout the book Chalmers is determined to find something about science that is, if not based on a single unified metholodogy, at least productive and progressive.

Think of the goats, Feyerabend!

I liked that about the book. Feyerabend's somewhat cheeky and anarchic ideas are fascinating and hold a kind of perverse sense (I'd better come back to him as well) but are counter-intuitive and I can understand that somebody would want to start with a bit of a proposition that science is useful, is progressive and while it might be slightly less easy to package up than we are sometimes led to believe it is, does actually have value over those poor goats.

I recommend this book. The internet informs me it's an excellent introduction to the Philsophy of Science and, for once, I agree with someone on the internet.