A fugue in five parts
About fifteen years after the movie Jaws came out amidst a flurry of hype, out of ennui I picked up a copy in an airport book store. It was much better than I expected and that persuaded me to finally see the movie and its sequels.
Similarly, by the time that I finally picked up a copy of the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, to tackle its profound and lofty summit, it had long before osmoted into the popular psyche and its reputation had preceded it.[1]
It was an influential book for me, catalyzing a paradigm shift in my thinking. I believe I was not alone. In comparing notes with others, however, I have found not a single person who derived the same conclusions I did.[2] A hallmark of a great book?
For background, in the sixties and seventies, severe tension existed between the Arts and Science. Technology co-existed (barely) with its corresponding "resistance movement".
To illustrate this tension with a couple of anecdotes, in the late seventies, I attended a work-sponsored, three-day course entitled "Interpersonal Communications". I vividly recall an interchange in the audience in which Y made some comment along the lines of, "science is the answer", following which, X made what seemed to be an ad hominem retort. Y responded to that in turn, clearly offended. I chipped in to mediate, (practicing my Interpersonal Communication skills?!), saying that I did not think that X was attacking Y personally, nor science/technology in general. About ten minutes later, X made another comment about science that was unmistakably antagonistic: sadly it became quite clear, (even to me), that X had an arts background and detested everything about science and technology.
In the mid-seventies at the university I attended, it was well known amongst the science faculty students that some wag had defaced the wall over the toilet paper dispenser in a stall in the toilets on the ground floor of the Engineering Department with the inscription, "Art Degrees: Please Take One".
Yes, there was tension.
The paradigm shift that Zen wrought in my thinking was to admit the idea that Science and the Arts are not separate and orthogonal as we commonly might believe. There is no left-brain/right-brain divide. They are not or should not be antagonistic toward each other.
Robert Pirsig's gentle persuasion for me was that Science is in fact an Art, and just as creative as any other.
Possibly we think of science as boring, plodding, tedious, detective work in a laboratory, on a black-board or out in the field. Certainly not primarily as a creative enterprise. The common perception, anyway.
The special distinction of Science as one of the Arts is only that it is constrained to reflect the observable universe; all others are free to range in imagination where they will.
Perhaps the reason for some confusion about the nature of science is the bifurcation of science as an activity: postulating a theory is an intensively creative process; on the other hand, testing the theory to disprove it[3] is (mostly) a grindingly pains-taking and tedious process.
This division of labor in science is, I think, profoundly important to understand. A theory is a work of creation. Testing it in practice is quite a separate undertaking. (Whether a theory comes before or after its confirmatory observation(s) is much like the chicken and egg, I suppose: it depends upon which chicken and which egg.)
In the sciences of the observable[4], I want to venture that a theory falls into one of two categories of status: it is either "disproven", or it is yet "unproven". Any theory that conflicts with legitimate observation is disproven. A theory that hasn't been disproven (by conflict with observation), may be further qualified in status by a) how much confirmation it has received from observation, b) how well it fits with the rest of the body of scientific "knowledge", and c) how elegant the theory is.
This last idea that theories may, in general, only be disproven, but never proven, is sobering because it introduces another commonly-believed-to-be-mutually-exclusive opponent into the realm of Science: that of Faith. It means that the majority[4] of scientific knowledge is provisional.
Rather than being a severe constraint on the creativity of the scientific process, the marvelous intricacy of Nature does, in fact, set the bar involuntarily high. You can't just practice the art at the level of your abilities and to the level of the credence/appreciation of your fans. Nature is the final arbiter.
Therefore I opine, Science must be considered as one of the Arts. The fact that it has an exclusive marriage with Nature does not ostracize it from the Arts, nor does this in any degree diminish its stature as an Art.[5]
[1] Similarly, I tackled Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid long after its initial splash. Call me a late bloomer.
[2] The same occurred with respect to my assessment of the movie, Apocalypse Now. No-one got the same thing I did.
[3] Another common misconception: you cannot prove a theory[4]; only disprove it. The harder and longer you try to disprove it and fail, the higher your confidence in the theory becomes. Oh: you have to let everyone else try to disprove it, too!
[4] Except perhaps in pure mathematics — some things there are "knowable". Some theories can be said to be "proven", although you will always have to depend upon the axioms. And you will always have to convince yourself the proof has no errors.
[5] I've had this whole idea of Science-as-Art for decades now, but only now in writing it up for this post have I been forced to entertain the idea that, if creativity forces Science to be classified as an Art (and most will not agree with this simply due to convention), then it's possible that faith in Science similarly forces me to consider it as a kind of Religion. (This is just the kind of plastic-minded guy I am.) Why I am hooked on blogs, I suppose.
My first thoughts on this are that, while Science as the First of Equals amongst Arts may easily coexist with them, most naturally, as a Religion, Science — a mono-atheistic religion, if you will — must unequivocally dispute all the other religions…
Science is the hand-maiden of Nature. All of Nature is a testament to the validity of Science. This is faith. Nature is indeed a jealous non-God and punishes non-believers: picture an open elevator shaft on the 50th floor with a sign, "Stairway to Heaven"! Choose a false religion at your own risk…
Next in the series: The Theory of Science
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