The Nature of Science

Thomas A. Moore
From Moore, Six Ideas That Shaped Physics 2nd edition, Unit C, New York: McGraw- i!! 2""#, $ % &

It is part of human nature that we strive to discern order in the cosmos and love to tell each other stories that exp!ain what we discern, using ideas common to our experience. Science stands firmly in this ancient tradition: stories a out how the gods guide the planets around the s!y and modern stories a out how the curvature of space"time does the same have much in common# $hat distinguishes science from the rest of the worldwide storytelling tradition is %&' the types of stories that scientists tell and %(' the process that science uses for creating and evaluating these stories. Scientists express their stories in the form of conceptual models, which ear roughly the same relation to the real world as a model airplane does to a real airplane. A good physical model captures a phenomenon)s essence while remaining small and simple enough to grasp. Model uilding is an essential aspect of science ecause reality is much too complicated to understand fully* models compress complex phenomena into ite"si+ed chun!s that can e digested y finite minds. Inventing a model is less an act of discovery than an act of i'a(ination: a good model is a vivid story a out reality that creatively ignores complexity. Model ma!ing in science happens at all levels. Theories"grand models a le to em race a huge range of phenomena"are for science what great novels are for literature: extraordinary wor!s of imagination that we strive to understand and cherish. ,ut to apply such a grand model to a real"life situation, we must also construct a smaller model of the situation itself, simplifying it and ma!ing approximations so that we can connect it to the right grand model. Scientists do this second !ind of model uilding daily, and one of the main goals of this course is to help you practice this art. It is crucial to note that ecause models are necessarily simpler than reality, all models have their limits: the full -truth- a out any phenomenon remains forever eyond our grasp. .ven so, one can distinguish )etter models from poorer models. /ood models are more logically self"consistent, more powerfully predictive in a roader range of cases, and more elegant in construction than their competitors. Science is, more than anything, a uni0uely powerful process for generating and evaluating models, one that %since its development in the &122s' has proved to e an astonishingly prolific producer of rich and powerful models. A discipline ecomes a science when the following four elements come together: &. A sufficiently large co''*nity of scholars. (. A commitment to !o(ica! consistency as an essential feature of all models. 3. An agreement to use reproduci le experiments to test models. 4. An o+erarchin( theory rich enough to provide a solid context for research.

In the case of physics, the /ree! philosophical tradition created a community of scholars who appreciated the power of logical reasoning. In fact, this community found its power so li erating that for a long time it imagined that pure logic should e s*,,icient to understand the world. The idea of using experiments to test one)s logic was not even fully expressed until the &3th century and did not gain full acceptance as eing necessary until the &5th century. .ventually, however, people recogni+ed that the human desire to order experience is so strong that one of the most difficult tas!s facing any thin!er is to distinguish the order that is really out there from that which only see's to exist. 6eproduci le experiments ma!e what would otherwise e individual experience availa le to the wider community, anchoring models more firmly to reality. /alileo /alilei %&714"&14(' was a great champion of this approach. 8is use of the newly invented telescope to display features of heavenly odies unimagined y any models of the time underlined to his sharpest contemporaries the inade0uacy of pure reason and the importance of o servation. If only the first three elements are present, the prescientific community, even if it agrees on certain data, is generally fragmented into schools, each exploring its own model. Some progress is made, ut at a much slower rate than when the whole community can wor! together. This was the situation in physics etween the times of /alileo and Isaac 9ewton. In &1:5, 9ewton pu lished the first model of physics road enough to em race oth terrestrial and celestial phenomena. This rilliant model captured the imagination of the whole physics community, and as this happened, physics ecame a science. The physics community shifted from arguing a out smaller partial models to wor!ing to(ether to refine, test, and extend 9ewton)s extraordinarily rich model, confident that it would e shown to e completely true and valid. The irony is that the community that strove to extend 9ewton)s model to cover everything eventually amassed the evidence needed to prove it ,a!se- ;nly a community that is de+oted to exploring a powerful model can collect the !ind of detailed and careful evidence necessary to prove it false and thus move on to etter models. This paradox is the engine that drives science forward.