Resources for Science

Sunny Y. Auyang

How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? (Oxford 1995)

from p. 113:
We have large areas of knowledge that are relatively thorough so that each area can be regarded as a large content. We can envision the development of the disciplinary sciences as attaining higher grounds and gaining wider views. However, no matter how high we climb and how sweeping the vista is, the view is always bounded by a horizon. The observed is a formal distinction that signifies the horizon of knowledge, which can be realized in any way physical theories see fit. As "I think" accompanies all my experiences, "we think" formally accompanies all our knowledge. Finitude is a human condition that cannot be obliterated by science. Perhaps we can broaden our horizon to include the physical interaction between quantum and classical objects, but we can never step out of our horizon to attain God's position.
from p. 192:
We have seen in section 27 that individuals must have relational properties if they are to relate to one another. The renormalization program demonstrates again that reliability depends on definite presuppositions. Individuals in isolation are different from individuals in a community; the former must be enriched with relatability to become the latter. The free electron is free only within the electron-electromagnetic field system, in which it is obliged by its own characteristics to relate causally with other electrons and the elctromagnetic field. As for the absolutely isolated and unrelatable electron, it turns out to be a ill-defined fiction.
from pp. 194-195:
Some philosophies assert that knowledge must be founded upon primitive elements that have no conceptual complexity, for these elements are given, certain, and free from theories. The role of theories is merely to organize the given elements for more efficient reckoning. We have found in our investigation that every notion they deem given is conceptually analyzable. One common assumption they make is that the world consists of preindivduated entities that constitute the domain of discourse, over which the variables of theories range. This assumption is shown to be dubious in quantum field theory, in which individuation of events is a major theoretical task that is achieved only with the concepts of space-time and private state spaces. The result of individuation, not the givenness of the entities, enables us to comprehend the world as comprising discrete events. Consequently the concept of individual entities is complex and incorporates intrinsic spatio-temporal notions. The concepts of properties and relations are equally analyzable. Even the basic relations of similarity and difference have important presuppositions that are tied to the concepts of enduring things and causality.

Henry H. Bauer

Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Illinois 1992)

from p. 61:
The myth of the method is not easily discarded, for one thing, because humankind is reluctant to accept that all knowledge contains an irreducible, inherent elemnt of uncertainty. Over the last few centruries, the authority of science came to supersede that of religion precisely because science seemed to offer more certain knowledge, at least about the tangible world. If scientific knowledge now turns out to harbor ineradicable uncertainties, then science is in essence a false god, and, moreover, is inferior to the God on whom science turned its back. Human beings, after all, do want to be certain about fundamental things, and religion offers (or used to offer) such certainty. So there is reluctance to accept that the method is a myth, reluctance especially on the part of atheists, secular humanists, Marxists, and other such ideologues - perhaps the more so because fundamentalists and New Age obscurantists have also been so eager to topple science from its pedestal of authoritative certainty.

Jack Cohen

The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, (Penguin 1994) coauthored by Ian Stewart,

from 428-429:
This bears on a major question, which we asked right at the start of the book and have not yet fully answered. Are the patterns we perceive in nature real, or are they figments of our imaginations? In The Mind's Sky Timothy Ferris uses the hourglass as an image of matter/mind: The upper half of the glass is the material universe, the lower half is a human mind, and the sand tricling from one to the other is information from the material world entering the brain. But, as the story of Newton's ears shows, that image is far too symmetric; it puts the mind's view of the universe on an equal footing with the universe's view of the mind. Now, the sand inside the mind is indeed a model of the material world, and it is that model that we manipulate when we seek patterns. The material world is not part of our minds. But our minds are part of the material world. The lower half of the hourglass is inside the upper half (but not vice versa). A better image might be the mathematician's Klein bottle which not only bends the lower half of the hourglass inside the upper, but does so in such a way that the combined sureface has only one side. The "mind" half is turned inside out, so that its contents are not directly identified with any of the contents of the material half.
This image emphasizes the fact that mind is a strange loop. "Information" about the material world can get into our minds by routes that do not pass through our sense organs. If somebody hits you on the head with a hammer and kills you, soe rather nasty information about the material world has had a direct and major effect on your mind, by destroying it. Hallucinogenic drugs affect the mind through its chemistry but create images that seem to have come from sense organs. The drugs affect those parts of the brain machine that process sensory data. The have the same kind of "unexpected" effect as the "wrong" coin in the ticket machine, mentioned in chapter 1, which persuaded the machine to disgorge an entire roll of tickets. This possibility was implicit in the mechanics of the ticket machine but was not intended to be part of its function. The same goes for drugs and brains.
The is no hourglass symmetry between mind and matter. To repeat an image from chapter 1, reality may perhaps be a figment of our imagination, as some philosophers argue, but our imagination is definitely a figment of reality.

John Cornwall

Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision, Oxford 1995. Essays from a September 1992 meeting:
- "Introduction. The scientist as rebel," Freeman Dyson
- "Must mathematical physics be reductionist?" Roger Penrose
- "Randomness in arithmetic and the decline and fall of reductionism in pure mathematics," Gergory J. Chaitin
- "Theories of Everything," John D. Barrow
- "Intertheoretic reduction: a neuroscientists's gield guide," Paul M. Churchland and Patricia S. Churchland
- "Neural Darwinism: the brain as a selectional system," Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi
- "A new vistion of the mind," Oliver Sacks
- "The limitless power of science," P. W. Atkins
- "Reductive megalomania," Mary Midgley
- "Artificial intelligence and human dignity," Margaret A. Boden
- "On 'computabilism' and physicalism: some subproblems," Hao Wang
- "Knowledge representation and myth," W. F. Clocksin
- "Memory and the individual soul: against silly reductionism," Gerald M. Edelman

Erik Davis

Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Harmony 1998)

from p. 38:
"The powerful aura that today's advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realization of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology's unconscious, it own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super-nature, and the more intensely we probe its mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural."

Mike Fortun

Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century, coauthored by Herbet J. Bernstein. Counterpoint 1998.
"Muddling Through is a book about the sciences in the late twentieth century and about the kind of sciences we need for the twenty-first. It is a book about how the sciences make sense of the world and provide sense to the world. Think of Muddling Through as the basic text for a different kind of science literacy project, a project to reimagine and then enact the sciences as operations of language and thought and as attempts, trials, limited experiments involving things, ideas, and just about everything in between.
"This is also a book about politics (not policy) and culture - that is, about how the sciences are made through arduous and diverse political processes. This book is about how the sciences affect politics not only through technological inventions but by generating the images and metaphors that we apply to every situation and phenomenon we encounter, and by providing the blueprints we use to make and legitimate crucial social decisions. The connnections between the sciences and democratic pluralism need to be revitalized, through both new concepts and innovative social forms."

Ian Hacking

The Social Construction of What? (Harvard, 1999)

from p. 68
... the science wars are founded upon, among other things of a more political or social nature, profound and ancient philosophical disputes.

Ralph Gun Hoy Siu

The Tao of Science: An Essay on Western Knowledge and Eastern Wisdom, (MIT 1957)

from pp. 136-137:
But modern science is beginning to forget the labor of her birth and Galileo's revolt against the scholastic trammels to establish "things as are and seen" in preference to "things as abstracted and conceived." Resplendent in her attainments and power, she is ascending the very same throne of the intellectual monarch she deposed.
Science now appears to be dictating the intellectual fashions of the day. If a plan is not prepared according to the scientific method, it is considered unreliable. If a question cannot be tested by science, it is considered meaningless. If traditional institutions are slow to adopt the scientific way, they are considered backward. If a mode of life is not comprehendible by science, it is considered old-fashioned. As a result of these intrusions, the certitude of purpose in the scheme of things begins to waver. Means are being homogenized with ends.
Many scientists are on the threshold of emulating theologians of the sixteenth century. Some are beginning to develop a pugnacity that bespeaks a deep uncertainty of brittle pride. Others are transgressing beyond their limited compass of competence. Still others seem not to care a doit that the unitary purpose of culture is being blunted and that the wholeness of meaning and the very tradition of a cooperative society are being disintegrated. If encouraged along the current trends, science may soon reach the point of diminishing usefulness to humanity. To retain her contributing relevancy is an important problem of the twentieth century.
from pp. 142-143:
As a result of her abstraction complex, science began to dissociate her thoughts from the parent reality of mankind from which she sprang. She wanted to be left alone to play with her artificial worlds, creating things and systems that often do not harmonize with the scheme of life and upsetting the equilibrium of the world in most explosive ways. For these reasons R. Guenon refers to modern science as the "degenerate vestiges" of the ancient traditional knowledge. Wiser scientists are beginning to realize that a specialist is but an abstraction of man, a personality out of context. They are beginning to appreciate Toynbee's conclusions that "there is no correlation between progress in technique and progress in civilization." Their souls clamor in their native humility for a return to the complete man. Yet to be men as men, they must cease being a particular kind f men. They cannot be men as scientists. They must shake off their servitude to the chains of abstracted and rational thought. They must control the scientific implements, put them in their proper perspective and lose them in the intimacy of their total experience as men.

Ecologies of Knowledge

edited by Susan Leigh Star, SUNY 1995. Contents:

"Science, Social Problems, and Progressive Thought: Essays on the Tyranny of Science", Jennifer Croissant and Sal Restivo
"The Politics of Formal Representations: Wizards, Gurus, and Organizational Complexity", Susan Leigh Star
"Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for Computerization", Rob Kling and C. Suzanne Iacono
"Representation, Cognition, and Self: What Hope for an Integration of Psychology and Sociology?", Steve Woolgar
"Research Materials and Reproductive Science in the United States, 1910-1940", Adele E. Clarke
Laboratory Space and the Technological complex: An Investigation of Topical Contextures", Michael Lynch
"Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door Closer", Bruno Latour
"Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network Analysis of Technological Change", John Law and Michael Callon
"Ecologies of Action: Recombining Genes, Molecularizing Cancer, and Transforming Biology", Joan H. Fujimura

John Ziman

Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science, (Cambridge 1968)
The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of Society, (Cambridge 1976)
Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science, (Cambridge 1978)
Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas: Occasional Pieces on the Human Aspects of Science, (Cambridge 1981)
Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamic Steady State, (Cambridge 1994)
Of One Mind: The Collectivization of Science, (American Institute of Physics 1995)

from p. 188:
Although we have no reason to doubt the practical reliability of well-explored and well tested branches of the natural sciences, we are also aware of the vast extent of our scientific ignorance on most matters of real human significance. No philosopher now supports a "scientific method" that can carry all before it in every field of knowledge. We must always ask to see the credentials of whatever is offered to us as scientific truth, look at how it is generated and validated, and make up our own minds whether it is more convincing than what we might derive from practical experience, common sense, personal insight, or social tradition.
Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means (Cambridge 2000)

from p. 4:
This new picture of science is somewhat more complicated that the outmoded stereotype. It is not so sharply defined. It does not claim total competence. It treats human knowledge as a product of the natural world. It does not pretend to be impregnable against thorough-going skepticism or cynicism. It calls for more modesty and tolerance than scientists have customarily cultivated about themselves and their calling. But it does provide stout intellectual and moral defence for science at the level of ordinary human affairs - the level at which nothing is absolute or eternal, but where we often forget that life is short, and feel passionately about pasts that we have not personally experienced, or plan conscientiously for the future welfare of people whom we shall never know.

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