The Mattasher Show

"The Mattasher Show" is made possible by Key West Adventures. See more of Key West and by Bascom Grooms Real Estate selling property in the Keys since the early 1900s. And by Keys Weekly, bringing the world to the Florida Keys and the Florida Keys to the world. (upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) author of several books, My guest today is the including a bold and intriguing new take on why science moved forward so quickly during the Enlightenment.

from the remnants of an accent, As you might be able to tell raised in New Zealand, he was born and but for almost two decades now, he's made Manhattan his home speaking engagements worldwide. as a professor at NYU with (soft music) I'm Michael Strevens, a philosopher at NYU. I work on philosophy of science, philosophy of the natural world, philosophy of people thinking about the way that the world works. If you like, I'm observing the observers of the natural world, this whole universe works.

thinking about the way (soft music) When I talk to scientists, I sometimes sneak up on them a little bit and see what they're up to, look over their shoulder. to get their jobs done, They really know how but it's not always in the way that you would expect. with the butterflies. And it's like being (soft music) (bird cawing) I live in New York city.

So this is all rather different for me, seeing a different kind of life, a different side of life, here at the butterfly conservatory. (soft music) This is an amazing place. anything like this. I have never seen (soft music) So much variation, so much beauty.

(soft music) (bird cawing) (soft music) absolutely beautiful, Well, this place is but I think I'm ready for change of place. Let's go to the ocean. (upbeat funky music) head out to Moray Bay. You think we might Sounds good to me.

Let's do it. (funky upbeat music) Michael. Welcome to Moray Bay Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here.

have you out here. It's great to I knew I had to invite you onto the show when I got an extremely strong recommendation from Peter Godfrey-Smith, one of the previous guests on "The Filter" podcast. And also when I read your book, "The

Knowledge Machine

How Irrationality Created Modern Science," and was blown away. The way I see it, threads going on in the book. you essentially have two One is a story of how it was that the Enlightenment changed science and created the progress that we see in science after that. And the other is a set of rules for scientists, essentially.

parts were intriguing, And both of those fascinating, and new, which is something rare in the philosophy of science, which is your area. But I wanna begin, if we could, with something more old and familiar, or someone older and more familiar, Isaac Newton. telling us why Newton, Could you begin us by besides being a genius, was so important for the development of science in the Enlightenment Certainly, yes. I think Newton more than anyone else created modern science by showing thinkers a way to organize their investigation into the world, that was unintuitive, subtitle, even irrational and as I put it in my and yet extraordinarily effective.

in a certain sense A technique that a little bit crazy would have seemed to the thinkers who came before Newton. Newton took up this method and simply pursued it, I think because of his own, perhaps inner craziness and was so extraordinarily successful with it world looked on, and said, that the rest of the "We have to do things that way." And what is the method? So what was method. The method is above all consistent, in a kind of narrowness and shallowness.

So Newton did two things. other, the natural philosophers First of all, unlike the who were also thinking about the way the world worked Rene Descartes, for example, in the 17th century, like Newton abandoned any attempt and philosophical way to think in a deep theories explain things. about the way that his enough that I've laid out He said, it's simply some causal principles, these are the principles of gravity that are able to predict the way that the planets move objects move on earth and the falling to get the right answers. It's enough to do that.

I don't need to philosophize roots of this causality. about the ultimate So that's one half of what he did. The shallowness, you might say. narrowness consisted And then the refusal to look anywhere else in his, you might say, for arguments for his system, other than simply observable facts.

Simply the ability of his theory to make these kinds of predictions. So these two really go together. as being a putting aside The refusal you can see of theological, of aesthetic arguments of philosophical, for believing in a theory. fascinated by all these things.

Interestingly, Newton was He wrote about the metaphysics of space, like Descartes. in religion and prophecy. He was very interested He forecast the date of the second coming, and yet at the same time, of his strangeness, and this is part and I can't explain his strangeness, but I know it was very important, all of that aside and says, at the same time he put "All that matters about my theory out these principles, is that I've laid these mathematical principles how the planets will move, that are able to tell us how objects will move on earth give us a good reason, and that's enough to exceptionally good reason to believe my theory." So essentially what he's done is provide a template for compartmentalizing belief. things about the book of the interesting And I think one was thinking about how much before the time of Newton and the Enlightenment, science was philosophy, was religion.

Those things were essentially indistinguishable, no? Well suddenly they were part of a seamless whole. So when Descartes, for example, who's living, really, just a few decades before Newton physics of the world, is formulating his which is a great creation of the 17th century, as Newton's physics is less fruitful, ultimately. but turns out to be far He brings in God, the nature of space, he brings in a kind of a philosophy of of the nature of matter.

And he knits it all together intellectually gorgeous picture, into this really quite this beautiful tapestry, all these different ways which brings together of thinking about the world, the philosophical way, the religious way, desire simply to get the facts and also the physical way, a about around us right. about what we see He brings all of that in and create something that's wonderful, to be really a dead end. but also that turns out Newton, on the other hand, isn't interested in the tapestry. following a single thread He's, if you like, just to see if he can get the facts, the observable facts right.

And this turns out, everyone else's expectations, contrary to pretty much to be the recipe for doing science in a way that has been so fruitful, that has led to the development of so much knowledge about the way the universe works and so much technological power, all of our lives so radically. which has of course improved Indeed. And then the irrationality part, that enters in in the idea Newton has done is say, that essentially what "This is information that we believe, but we're discarding it. This is a worldview that we have, as a fundamental way that we believe in of seeing everything around us.

And in order to move forward, we need to throw that away, even when, in some ways, be good to risk it." that may actually So I like to think of a lot of what happens in science is essentially through mistakes. These are almost rules of thumb that we use to get things done. And what Newton says is even if you ever had the risk that may have served you in the past, the only one you wanna use is empirical. right way to put it?

Would that be the I think that's exactly right. discovered a new heuristic. So Newton, in effect, I think not so much by thinking through things from first principles opposite of the way he operated, in a way that's exactly the but more by a kind of a natural compartmentalizing mindset. When he was doing physics, he just focused on a few things and ignored all of these other things, enormous personal interest.

in which he himself had doing these other things, And then when he was he was likewise narrow. explain why he was like that. And again, I can't really intellectual MO, if you like. That was his his And it was simply by observing how successful it was, narrowness and shallowness, by observing how this which didn't seem in any antecedent way to make any sense, seeing how it was able to allow Newton to create this theory that had a kind of a power seen in the world before that simply hadn't been that convinced the rest of the world things Newton's way.

to start doing So he convinces people either intentionally or just by his very being to strip off some of the philosophical, of their framework or religion parts for understanding the world. And this is highly successful, is the contention here, that had to be left behind that this was baggage in order for science to be really explored in the way that we see it today as such a powerful tool at force. That's right. And in a way it's not even baggage something that is heavy in the sense of and is not really helping you.

The thinkers of Newton's day believed that it was helpful, himself believed it was helpful. and in some sense, Newton argue with Descartes, So he was happy to about the nature of matter. But then for some reason, he simply didn't bring those philosophical arguments into his scientific process. And it was because of that, that he was able to focus on this single question predictions exactly right, of getting the getting the trajectories of the planets exactly right.

cannonballs exactly right. or the trajectories of It's that focus that turned out to be so successful. And we see the same thing even today. We see physicists on the one hand extol the virtues of aesthetic thinking, the importance of the beauty of theories, and then to argue for its theory, but when science goes the observable facts only conforming to counts as a legitimate scientific argument.

And still today, right way to do things. that seems to be the So, Newton has this template that he unintentionally creates or intentionally, who knows? And it works very effectively. You call this in the book, the iron rule.

concrete definition of that, But before I get to a I wanna talk a little bit about the two main giants in the history of the philosophy of science in the 20th century. That would be Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, right? And they each had a distinct view on how science advanced. outline of each of those views?

Could you maybe give a brief Yeah, sure. So Popper thought that that the key to science was challenging theories very aggressively with experimental data and seeking as far as possible to prove everything false. He called it falsification. Mm-hm.

So his idea was that the way science works is that it's always challenging its own best theory. And when the challenge is successful, the theory is destroyed out and find a new theory. and scientists have to go And so you might understand Popper as saying, that science has developed what was really the way to be so effective hinges on a critical attitude rather than simply accepting ideas congenial or beautiful because they're or fit with your prevailing system of thought, regarded with suspicion. rather, everything is Everything is considered to be probably wrong.

And your job as a scientist is to show that it really is wrong. quite brutal attitude And so that really, intellectually, is the key to sciences' success. That's what Popper says. the extreme form, Right.

And in Popper's belief was we can't even really know anything. All we can do is know negatives, know what isn't the case. That's right. have already been proved false.

So there are theories that that are extremely suspicious. And then there's the theories So, the things that we think we know, but the things... Anyway. So.

then you have Thomas Kuhn. view that was, in some ways, And Kuhn really had a opposed to Popper's. diametrically So for Popper, the secret to the good scientist is this critical attitude that seeks disproof everywhere. Kuhn thought the secret to science weren't critical at all.

was that scientists prevailing school of thought. Rather, they sign on to the Kuhn famously used the word paradigm, theoretical framework, a kind of a a methodological framework, complete set of rules to some extent a say if it's physics, for doing, let's doing physics or doing biology. question those rules, And they don't they simply advance the program by trying to build the system in a more and more rich way. So precisely the opposite scientists should be doing.

of what Popper thought And yet in doing this, they do something that's unwittingly Popperian. They're looking for the last few pieces, if you like, of the jigsaw puzzle. And when they finish those, picture and they'll be done. they'll have the complete But the paradigm is never quite right, pieces never quite fit.

and the last few And in their intense desire to finish the puzzle, they discover this fact unwittingly. It's the last thing they wanna do, puzzle is insoluble. is show that the precisely what they do, And yet that's because of their commitment, because of their belief in solvability of the puzzle. And then doing this, they bring about something Popperian falsification.

which is much like sometimes a very little fact They've excavated, fit into the framework that just will not that they wholeheartedly believe in. In a sense, what he's saying is that we disprove theories by trying to gather evidence to collaborate or corroborate that theory. We go down the rabbit hole of getting ever more precise measurements and information related to that theory and the predictions that we'd make, and then we discover a problem. Because of their commitment whole hearted belief, because of this they can't just say like a Popperian scientist, "Oh, well, there goes another theory.

We'll move on to the next one and try to prove that false too" really quite stricken. Instead they're Not just the rug has been pulled out from under their feet, their world is toppling down around them. Science goes into, what Kuhn calls, a crisis, but when things go well, somebody is standing by, who's able to have a new original and wholly different idea, kind of creative type, a revolutionary, some who will suggest a completely new way of doing things science will move on and eventually to this new way of doing things, that's what Kuhn calls a paradigm shift, but also a scientific revolution. And that's how science proceeds, revolution after revolution, as scientists push the old paradigm to the point where it falls apart, choice, if you like, and then have no to jump off the sinking ship whatever is still afloat and just hold on to and to sail off in a new direction.

So those are the two main ways the development of science that people tend to view and how it makes progress. view, which is compelling to me I would throw in one more and your own view is compelling, but before we get to that one, the details of it, and to more of I would want to also mention that there's a philosopher of science, Deborah Mayo, who is also a previous "Filter" guest, that science advances who has the idea by what you call severe testing. So in Popper's world, you can never know anything is true, all you can do this falsify. that what really happens But what she argues is beliefs to severe tests, is that we submit meaning things that would show an opposite result if the theory was wrong.

And if you submit a theory to enough of these severe tests, then you gain a high level of confidence, that that theory is correct. So that's her theory. I now wanna get to yours, maybe might be encapsulated and I'd say that yours called the iron rule. with something That's right.

kind of a systematization So the iron rule is a of what Newton was doing back in the late 17th century. And I think even Newton himself, when he published the second edition of his great book, "The Principia," much later on in life, those ideas, he looked back many years after he had and started to theorize about what he was doing that worked so well as did many scientists around him. And what they did was, in effect, they systematized Newton's idiosyncratic psyche, of rules for doing science and turned it into a set that anyone can follow. And a particular rule, what I'm calling the iron rule.

little bit more detail, So going into a you've said that a rule information from consideration, about eliminating certain us a little bit more detail but maybe you could give about the iron rule. Absolutely. Yeah. legislates this shallowness So the iron rule that I was talking about and this narrowness in Newton's own thinking.

you're doing science, It says that when or it would be better to say, scientific arguments officially, when you're presenting 'cause it doesn't really limit the way that scientists think in the back of their own minds. legislate that anyway, Of course, nobody can effectively and maybe they shouldn't. But when it comes to official scientific arguments, publishing your books so, when you're journals, and so on, and your papers and laying out the reasons to believe some theory or to reject some of the theory, the only thing that counts is a theories ability kind of way, observable facts. to explain in the shallow of things don't count.

So that means a lot It means that certain kinds of philosophical arguments these causal principles that makes sense of that are the bedrock of your theory. Those kinds of things are irrelevant. aesthetic arguments, It means that aesthetic judgments or if you like about the beauty of a theory. about the elegance of a theory, they're not part of the process.

or religious considerations It means that theological are not part of the process. It's really just this one thing. This one thing that people have always thought was important is now the only thing that's important, facts, the movements of objects, and that's predicting the the properties of objects the shapes of objects, that we can observe in the world around us. your model and your theory In other words does make testable predictions with precise information that you can go out and see, or how closely does this fit what the model says?

That's what it's all about. I must say I find that a fairly compelling idea. And in some ways, even though this is extremely bold, what you're doing, especially in terms of the way advising scientists, in which you're in effect, to keep their heads down, looking through the microscope, details in front of you just focus on the and don't go up into the clouds. I think actually a level beyond that that's interesting to me wherein we get rid completely of the need for causality.

as of late, especially, In fact, my thinking most of the low hanging fruit is that we may have plucked causality and science when it comes to and that to make progress from here forward, entirely creating explanations we need to stop almost that have to do with causation of things and rely essentially on correlation that spit out a number. on black box models and if that black box model does a good job number that corresponds of spitting out a to the reality that we see, then that's a good model. And it doesn't matter if that model has an interpretation that's friendly to us, that makes sense to us. interesting suggestion, Well, that's an doing is taking what Newton did 'cause what it's in effect and the kind of shallowness that Newton brought which has been so successful to scientific thinking, for the last 300, 350 years and making it shallower still.

So if this worked so well, dial to 11? (chuckles) why not turn up the Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea though? answer to that question.

I don't know the I don't think any of us do yet. As I said, when Newton started doing this, I don't think anyone knew then either. A lot of the great majority, I think, Newton's compatriots in time, of 17th century thinkers, would have thought that his way of doing things was a bad idea, that it involves this rejection of all kinds of information, of forms of thought, that as I said, even Newton thinks are important. worked really well.

Nevertheless, it And it could be, that even if the world place, everything has a cause. is a fundamentally causal philosophical principle, that's a kind of which still lingers in the iron rule, I think. it might possibly work. Even if that's true, with your idea here So, I'm running matter that it's true, to say it doesn't we should forget it anyway.

it for heuristical purposes, That is, we should forget when doing science. where we're trying to predict We've gotten to the point that are so causally complex the behavior of systems that actually trying to understand their causal structure is counterproductive. Yeah. I hope that resonates with your view.

we're still able to do And so the thing that is find the correlations. What we shouldn't spend a lot of time doing is looking at the causal roots. I think so, at any rate, or I should say that I think that we've gotten very far maybe the additional... with causation, but that has at times held us back.

But it's also been something There've been a lot of theories be good theories, but that turned out to they were discarded because we didn't understand the cause of that. have germ theory, Like, we didn't and so a lot of people dismiss the idea that a physician's dirty hands could cause women to die in childbirth, because that didn't make any sense. We didn't have a mechanism to understand that. But if we had, instead just focused on the correlation that might've been enough which was very strong to push people earlier hands before surgery.

into washing their A very contemporary example of this kind of thinking is what's going on in artificial intelligence right now. So for a long time, people have tried intelligence by looking to see to build artificial how the human mind works and reproducing that causal structure in their computer programs. But recently, especially there has been enormous success recognition, self-driving cars, across the board, image building what's, in effect, language processing, in a purely correlational model, a model that simply looks for the statistical connections between the inputs and the desired outputs. understand in any way, Without trying to how at least the human mind is able to use those inputs as it were to cause the outputs.

And some artificial, and perhaps many artificial intelligence engineers of story we're developing here would go along with that kind that human thought and say it's not is not fundamentally causal, it's just that it's too complicated to try to re-engineer it. And our prediction machines, we should take a completely different approach kind of our black box and just build a that statistically gets the connections right. Michael Strevens' work on this own investigations reminds me of my called cargo cults. into what are This is a label that was applied people in the Pacific islands to the groups of indigenous who saw vast amounts of cargo dropped onto their lands by soldiers during WWII, miraculous abundance in reaction to this falling out of the sky, landing strips and wooden planes they built their own dirt airdrops would continue.

in the hopes that the The term cargo cult is meant as a pejorative in the world of science. If we don't understand why something is happening, we are doomed to magical thinking. A good scientist avoids cargo cult thinking. But I've argued science and business analytics, that at the frontiers of we are now all cargo cultists.

We take an approach that is basically, "If we build it and they come, then we built the right thing." And this approach has been highly fruitful. In other words, it's fine to be a cargo cultist, good feedback loop. you just need a And that loop often doesn't need an understanding of causality. data and good software.

It requires lots of I would say that much of modern science is now simply a more efficient cargo cult the mid century Melanesians. than the ones developed by deepest level, basically I suppose, at the what we're saying here is that all of this is storytelling always simplifies, and storytelling complicated and messy. and reality can be this, to the iron rule, There is an aspect to and in particular to the very narrow focus on, say, the experiment at hand, that for me, almost borders uncomfortably on almost a morality. You have an image in the book of a, what was it, slowly removing oxygen a glass where they're from a bird and watching it die.

you're talking about that, And it's interesting when in some ways that is the epitome of doing science, Newton's template. according to the On the other hand, a bird is dying. There are obviously much more extreme examples of that narrow-minded, what this does," approach "Let's just figure out into account broader thoughts. that doesn't perhaps take think that the iron rule Well, the reason I works so well is that it funnels all of a scientist's energy and attention into creating empirical evidence.

kind of evidence that's needed And it turns out that the for science to really progress amounts of energy, requires enormous patience, attention, dedication, from all sorts of reverses the ability to come back and disasters even, and keep pushing and digging up this data. machine, if you like, that says So it's a motivational "Nothing else is important, just go for the evidence." way in which that narrowness And you've pointed out one can be, not just as I like to say, irrational, but even unethical. it is in a certain sense, So science hinges so much on creating this evidence that it pushes all other considerations aside. very good from that, We get something help as human beings, but we can hardly as ethical creatures.

And also simply as rational creatures, who think that all of these forms of thought matter, we're doing this all wrong. thinking, "Well, maybe rethink science." Maybe we should get very uncomfortable. And there, I start to I see something that works very well, yet, I'm one of these rational, ethical creatures too. understand the iron rule, As we're beginning to to go through an example maybe it'd be helpful of how that works out in practice.

Maybe if you have something that's a bit more recent than Newton's time. Yeah. Well, I kick off one of the chapters in my book I keep coming back to, with an example that 'cause it's such a rich case. When Einstein's general theory of relativity, so Einstein's theory of gravitation replace Newton's theory, that ultimately came to a completely different way of thinking about the way gravity worked, where it's not actually a force in any way at all.

When that was first proposed, right in the middle of WWI, a British scientist, Arthur Eddington, who was really captured by the mathematical elegance and beauty of Einstein's theory sought to actually gather some empirical evidence, he hoped in its favor. rule, commanded him to, So he, as the iron he was not able simply to appeal to the theory's beauty, to the elegance. So the properties of the theory, properties that appeal which really were the to him most personally. He had to arrange an experiment, And he himself personally led this experiment, which involved a number of English physicists, sailing off to the tropics to take some photographs of the night sky, middle of a total solar eclipse.

or other the day sky in the By a happy coincidence- But tell me, what does the solar eclipse due for this? Why is it important that it was a solar eclipse? the Einstein's theory The thing is that made a prediction about the bending gravitational fields, of light by that it would be more intense than Newton's theory predicted. So we could test Einstein's theory by looking to see how much the starlight changes its course, as it flies past the sun, which is the biggest gravitational object vicinity of earth.

we have in the Right. So the idea was to, by looking at a star field to see what degree behind the sun, bending there was. of gravitational The thing is, though, that the sun is extremely bright compared to stars. under which the sun's light So we needed conditions wasn't getting in the way.

Answer, a total solar eclipse, which by good luck a very favorable one, was going to occur in the middle of 1919, the end of the war. so, shortly after And that would be, really, the first opportunity test of Einstein's theory. to perform this kind of So Eddington sailed off with, as I say, with a few collaboratives to two different places that would be in the path of this eclipse, which was really ran through the tropics. One of the places they made an observation was in Brazil, up near the Amazon, in Principe island and the other was off the west coast of Africa.

many scientific experiments And the idea was, as with was to do something that was in principle, very simple, but in practice very hard, which was simply to point a camera at the stars around sun at the time of the eclipse, the positions of those stars take a photo and compare to the positions that they had when the sun was nowhere to be seen. So they're just those same stars in the night sky, other side of the earth, when the sun was on the and then you compare these two images the stars apparently shift, and you can see how much much light is being bent. and that tells you how straightforward *rate, It's a very except that first of all, you had to sail for months and months to these rather exotic locations to take these photographs. and the positions of the stars And second, the difference on the photographic plates that they were producing that would reveal whether Einstein's completely new theory of gravitation was correct or not.

The the difference between the Newtonian position Einsteinian position as it were, and the was just a tiny fraction of a millimeter, observable to the naked eye. not really, even directly jostling of the telescopes So just the slightest directed the sunlight or the mirrors that or anything like that into the telescopes would throw everything off. the results came out, As it happened. when that they were rather mixed.

There was one telescope that made it look like Newton was right. Another telescope made it look like Einstein was right. And one further telescope, Eddington's own telescope, just managed a couple of observations. in Principe, unfortunately, It was a very cloudy day part of the vicissitudes of doing experimental science.

to photograph a solar eclipse You travel for three months isn't so good. (chuckles) and then the weather also, he managed to massage And Eddington's results, Einsteinian result. into a kind of an few things about science. So this illustrates a One is simply that the way the iron rule pushes scientists, something relatively easy, rather than doing beauty of Einstein's theory, point out the mathematical well, easy for Eddington anyway, who was a very accomplished mathematical physicist, incredibly difficult and risky, forces them to do something namely perform this eclipse experiment.

have shown the opposite and- Risky in that it could Well, risky in the sense it could have failed completely. It could have been completely cloudy in both places, and they would have spent half a year or really a whole year preparations and so on, with all the and produced nothing of value whatsoever. But nevertheless, they had to take that risk because the iron rule only allows that kind of fact as a scientific argument. aside the massaging So, setting of the analysis of the data, which I found fascinating, a lot about good theories it also got me thinking versus bad theories.

And there's two ways to look at what makes a good theory. makes good predictions, One is it's a good theory because it which is what you talk about in the book. But reading through that example, there's also a different way can be good or bad, in which a theory and that is how easy is it to test that theory? So we have theories that in that sense, the meta sense of a theory, are actually very good, bad, like flat earth, right?

even though they're very easily disproven every day That theory is very flying around the earth by everyone who's station zooming about and the space orb that we inhabit. looking down on the it's a good theory. In that sense, We can dismiss it very quickly, evidence readily at hand we have lots of to look at that theory and go in the Popperian sense, falsified, done, move on. theories that are harder.

Then there are other Einstein's relativity, In the case of it wasn't a simple matter of observing some stuff, specialized condition to happen. and there you go, it took a And so as you get to theories that are harder and harder to prove, sense, a worse theory, you get, in some at least at the meta-level. dimensions here, in a way. There are really two In a way, Einstein's theory makes itself very easy to disprove because it makes all of these very specific predictions.

out these predictions However, it turns like that 60th of a millimeter involve these tiny quantities plates or, for example, on the photographic the Gravity Probe B experiment the kinds of discrepancy that was looking for, another test of Einstein's theory that took 40 years to put together, launched a probe into space relativistic effect that measured the or the attempt to detect gravitational waves, which also took about 40 years to come to fruition and ultimately succeeded a few years ago in 2015. theory says a lot. The Einstein's It gives you a lot of clues about where you might look for a disproof, or for confirming evidence, but at the same time, it's extremely arduous it turns out that and also extremely expensive to actually go to- Figure out evidence. Figure out if- Yeah, if the evidence...

and then at the extreme end, bit about string theory you talked a little is it to prove that. and just how hard So that's a great way of testing dimensional conception this whole two of the goodness of a theory. on the one hand string theory make certain predictions. On the other hand, these predictions completely impossible to test.

turn out to be practically, So what should we think about such a theory? Some scientists have thought that we should in fact abandon the iron rule, We should, because string theory, although it theoretically makes predictions, practically impossible to test, makes predictions that are thousand years into the future, even looking forward a would ever have the capacity it's hard to imagine we machines that would test it, to build the kinds of versions of the theory. or test various thought, therefore, Scientists have we should allow the aesthetic merits of the theory to be introduced into scientific arguments and it's exactly the way that the iron rule says they should not be. So make beauty count.

Exactly. So go back to Eddington. He saw the beauty of Einstein's theory, understand Einstein's theory, and as scientists came to many physicists saw the beauty and were susceptible to persuasion in this way, but in the end, he had to get on that boat couple of months to get there, and sail off to Principe, a a month of setting up the equipment, on the day being good or not. all hinging on the weather, He had to do that because the iron rule said aesthetic arguments don't count.

what's sometimes called The proponents of post-imperial physics, really wanna understand think because we only way we're gonna appreciate how the world works, and the what the the good versions of string theory are, is to look to their aesthetic merits, we need after 350 years, progress since Newton, after all of this we need to dissolve the iron rule something more broad based, and replace it with something that looks a little bit more like what Newton's predecessors in the 17th century were doing. capacious way of thinking A broader and more about which scientific theories are correct. Which is not your opinion. So I try not to be a dogmatist.

was commenting on your idea As I was saying, when I perhaps go so shallow that we should even with our explanations, that we should abandoned causality altogether. I say just as in Newton's time, know what would work. we didn't really for sure what will work. So, now I don't know alive to the dangerous here.

But I do think we should be What we don't want to do is go back to a way of thinking, choice between sailing off where we are given the a six-month expedition as Eddington did for particularly fine argument and simply developing a about the elegance and symmetry of a theory, we opt for the easy, and in some ways, exciting way of doing things. the more intellectually And ultimately discovering that relativity is correct is very intellectually exciting. But going out there and setting up all that equipment and so on is not very intellectually rewarding at all. get to see parts of the world It may be bracing and you that you wouldn't otherwise see, of adventure in the mind but it's not the kind that being into the mathematical roots is the kind of thing that, you know I'm a philosopher, I went into philosophy to do.

it's the kind of thing that And yet- I'm worried that if the scientists start philosophizing too, that science will sag. Yeah, it seems to me that you're in philosophy, whether or not the message in the book seems pretty clearly, do the work. Mm-hm. Stick to the iron rule.

Don't be seduced away by philosophical arguments. And when I say that, it's not as if I don't believe philosophical arguments, in the importance of ultimately I just... But I think that in science, it's important to keep them off the table those scientists to go in order to force and be thoroughgoing in process. So in a way, we're putting blinkers on the scientists.

This is, this is where we get to the irrationality of the modern scientific method. think about everything We're saying, don't that's important here. You need to be narrow-minded. I can sit back as a philosopher and be broad minded, but I know that science is not gonna get us what we want from science, unless you, the scientists, are narrow-minded.

And so I have to applaud that narrow-mindedness and advocate for it. And that's what I'm doing in the book. Before we wrap up. could get you to read I'm wondering if I that I particularly enjoyed, a passage from your book comment on it for us.

and then maybe "Science then is built up like a coral reef. Individual scientists are the polyps secreting a shelly carpus reef upon their departure. that they bequeath to the sterilized public record That carpus is the of their research, a compilation of observation or experimentation, derivation, where possible and the explanatory of the data from known theories and axillary assumptions. The scientist like a polyp is a complete living thing, all too human in just the ways that the historians science have described.

and sociologists of When the organism goes, however, its humanity goes with it. evidential exoskeleton What is left is the of a scientific career. that is scientific knowledge The intellectual edifice these exoskeletal remains. is composed largely of It is held together like a reef, by the evidence and argument not by living things, but that living things produce assembled according to a strict architectural plan ordained by the iron rule." So what am I saying there?

I'm saying that on the one hand, subjective human process, science is this very goes into science, and a lot of what the logic of science, comes not just from statistical testing, from the logic of our functional structure from the indisputably, instruments, and so on, of measurement like Eddington's telescope, the workings of something about what was going on. but also also guesses Eddington's telescopes So I mentioned with that some of the results looked more like Newtonian results and some of them looked more Einsteinian. And Eddington and his team had to guess. the Newtonian telescope And they decided that kind of a malfunction.

probably suffered a confirming Newton's theory, So it looked like it was wrong, whereas the telescope but something had gone confirming Einstein's theory that looked like it was was working perfectly well. Some of Eddington's colleagues, were interested in relativity the other physicists who were not so sure. subjective element of science. So that's the human and science in the moment, And if you look at then you see a lot of this stuff going on.

You see a lot of arguments, unresolved argument often. So all of us who have lived through the COVID crisis process in action, have seen this different scientists, different bodies interpreting the science for us that are supposed to be disagreeing with one another not so much evidence when there's still about what really is going on. communicated by aerosols? Is the disease touch?

Is it droplets? Is it communicated by There was a lot of uncertainty. is where I move on However, and this to the reef metaphor, over time, what scientists do is they record their observations, they lay down their observations in a layer, if you like, those observations. and they build up And those observations are never in themselves indisputable, build up such a record, but with time you in the case of, for example, of the bending of light, Eddington was testing the thing that with his photographs during the eclipse, done that same experiment we've many times now during total eclipse and seeing what we've seen.

And slowly it's become clear that when things are working really well, we get the degree of bending that Einstein predicts. So you see that what was once upon a time organic and human becomes more and more solid and mushy and subjective and objective like the reef, and the success of science long-term implications comes from the of these thick, deep layers of evidence that are built up over time by scientists pushing and pushing and pushing as the iron rule says they must to create more and more empirical evidence. I think what I like the most about that analogy is that it's a reminder completely solid and Rocky that behind what looks like the corals we saw when we were snorkeling actually, behind that is a history of a lot of vibrant activity, uncertainty, as you say and a lot of things are gonna go. about which way history around that rock There's an entire that's really fascinating.

That's right. And the whole purpose of the iron rule, in a way, hinges on the humanness, the organic, nature of scientists, the subjective importance it's consistent. because above all its It's being able to focus scientists' attention entirely on empirical evidence. You could imagine some kind of alien life form that was completely cold and rational, and simply did everything that it needed to do the investigation of the universe work.

in order to make And that that alien life form would put all of the work into generating empirical evidence that was needed. It would do all of that, it would be sailing off, or maybe just flying off in its anti-gravity cars to the tropical islands to measure the bending of light, and so on. But at the same time, it would be fine to introduce as well these aesthetic arguments that many physicists find so compelling, even philosophical arguments. could bring everything in.

The alien intelligence capacious and so calm It would be so that they would have room, they would have time for it all, but our human intelligences are a little bit more impatient, easily distracted. a little bit more And what the iron rule does is it pinpoints the single most valuable kind of thought. Not the only valuable kind of thought, valuable kind of thought but the single most and says only focus on this. The iron rule takes the subjectively easily distracted human single thing that matters most and focuses them on the for creating knowledge of the way that the universe works.

much for coming out here Well, thank you so and giving us a chance to focus on the ideas in your book. It's a fascinating work and it's interesting to think about changed in the Enlightenment exactly what it is that tremendous progress. and created such Well, thanks so much for inviting me out here, Matt. unimportance of beauty place to discuss the It's a beautiful scientific knowledge.

in pursuing (both laughing) Well, thanks for coming out and giving us a chance to focus on the ideas in your book. It's been a pleasure having you out here, and talking about the way in which science develops. Its a really interesting journey, are all on right now. that I suposse we We'll thanks very much for inviting me out here Matt, it's a beautiful place to discuss.

the ways in which ignoring beauty development of scientific knowledge has been so important to the That may be true, but i do appreciate a little bit of beauty from time to time. As do I. Alright, that was cheeseball and whatever. (both laughing)

Off Camera

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