Jul 29 2008
Planck and Science
I’ve been moving this last week and have been without Internet access, so I’ve been reading a little more. The latest is Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer. Last night I came across this quote by Max Planck which I haven’t heard before and thought it was interesting.
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.
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Or, the more snarky version: “science progresses one death at a time”.
I hadn’t heard it attribute to Planck, but that’s pretty much the thesis of Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, which despite being popular in a very dubious relativist/deconstructionsit sociology-of-science crowd and despite the dubious relativist musings at the end, is actually a good read.
Kuhn provides a very interesting defense of this proposition drawing extensively on historical detail.
One of my first blog entries ever asks whether this is still an applicable theory, on the grounds that “scientific revolutions” are very rare:
http://pining.blogspot.com/2005/10/kuhnian-revolution.html
I discuss the specific case of climate science briefly.
Or, in a quip often attributed to Timothy Ferris, “Science advances, funeral by funeral.”
Yup,
evolution will have its say. Warmers will not survive as they refuse to evolve and are being de-selected!!
[Reply: It's clear you don't understand evolution either.]
Mike Tobis, most everyone (I’d guess everyone except Planck’s biographers) learned about that quote from Kuhn, who cites it in _Structure_. Indeed, it’s come to be known as the “Planck-Kuhn” thesis.
It’s not literally true, of course. Most scientists, senior or junior, eventually respond to the accumulation of evidence. I’ve been told by professional historians of science that empirical examinations of the responses of working scientists to “scientific revolutions” don’t show any correlation to the age of the scientist. (Ask John Wilkins, Evolving Thoughts on Scienceblogs, about this - he’s one of the people who told me this.)
I suspect that it largely comes down to reporting bias. A distinguished senior scientist who rejects a major development in his field is much more likely to get publicity than 99 equally distinguished, equally senior scientists who smoothly switch to the new paradigm.
I have a nearly relevant story and a challenge that I’d like to share. Last summer I was in Romania for the first of two heat waves there, and while I was in a village there I saw a very large & active earwig get squished. I was peeved because I would have liked to have observed it more closely, but the guy with the quick foot said that they crawl into your ear and damage your brain (or something like that — his English wasn’t very good and my Romanian is awful).
Well, out of coincidence I looked it up on wikipedia just the other day and found [English has derived a verb from this, to earwig, meaning "to fill someone's mind with prejudice by insinuations" or "to attempt to influence by persistent confidential argument or talk"] as well as the debunking of the ear-damage myth. I’d never heard earwig used as a verb before, but I think I’m going to start using it — particularly with reference to why people might believe strange things.
It is in this spirit that I submit this challenge: who can best KuhnKat in presenting a single confidence-exuding statement that shows they understand neither climatology nor evolution? I have one for consideration:
Humanity doesn’t affect the climate, but if it did, and if evolution was true, plants and animals would just evolve to deal with it. (Admittedly I had to steal that from an old column by Mike Jenkinson of the Edmonton Sun because it was better than anything I could think up.)