March 18, 2006
SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
Kevin Kelly in Edge:
A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science...
2000 BC — First text indexes
200 BC — Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
1000 AD — Collaborative encyclopedia
1590 — Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
1600 — Laboratory
1609 — Telescopes and microscopes
1650 — Society of experts
1665 — Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
1665 — Scholarly journals
1675 — Peer review
1687 — Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
1920 — Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
1926 — Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
1937 — Controlled placebo
1946 — Computer simulation
1950 — Double blind experiment
1962 — Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:48 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Aieee! Someone close the italics tag! My eyes!
Posted by: verbatim | Mar 18, 2006 2:39:03 PM
I agree - why the italics? Not such a good look.
Posted by: anna | Mar 18, 2006 6:17:21 PM
1590 — Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
Ummm... surely that should have been either 1290 instead of 1590, or Francis instead of Roger. (Probably the latter).
Posted by: Alejandro | Mar 19, 2006 7:54:18 AM
The author seems to make many exaggerated claims for the potential benefits of computers in the future. While computers do have their place, it is difficult to see how they are a panecia for the ills of science or medicine or the world's problems.
For example, I would argue that no students should be permitted to use calculators until they graduate from high school, lest they fail to learn the true concepts of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, logarithms, exponents, limits, etc. It makes much more pedagogical sense to go back to using the slide rule, which was invented by the English mathematician Oughtred in about 1620, but made "obsolete" in the 1970's by the hand calculators, although the slide rule will still get 3 or more significant figures of accuracy witout recourse to batteries so long as the sunlight or other light is available. I had a physics teacher (an electrical engineer) once who had a longer slide rule which could read 4 significant figures or more. Yet most students today not only do not know what a slide rule is or was, but could care less, just as they care little about science and engineering.
Will the computer age help with conflicts of interest in research? How will these computing machines help prevent brainwashing of the general population which likely has never had a science class and has no concept of what real science is? We have had fancy computers for a number of years now, and even Fermat's Last Theorem was tested to thousands of integer combinations with no counterexample, yet did that prove the theorem? No.
What about censorship of information even in university and public libraries? What about the problem of the millions of new books in bookstores but the absence of most books on vital subjects, like the failure of large amounts of money thrown at certain problems by government to solve problems like cancer, Alzheimers disease, neurological diseases, the betrayal by the Food and Drug Administration in failing to protect our food supply, etc.?
Anyone who thinks they will someday have a hand held computer which, by the touch of a button, will "solve" Enstein's field equations, or calculate a proton from quarks or even solve the hydrogen atom from first principles, is likely living in an Alice in Wonderland world. Every time a computer is used, enormous efforts must be made to check the internal calculations. Do you remember a few years ago when Intel announced an error "down deep" in a chip? First they said likely no one would use it for the purposes it might fail. Later they replaced all the defective chips. Anyone who has ever done mathematical calculations on a computer, or even by hand, knows, how careful one must be when dividing near zero. Special mathematical representations must always be used in these cases.
Many other problems arise when attempting to integrate or "solve" nonlinear differential equations or integral equations. All the theorems about uniqueness of solutions apply only to linear equations.
Will the computer simulations on cancer research cause the medical orthodoxy to go back and read the 500+ research papers of Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D. and cause them to understand his many experiments, and those many experiments of others, demonstrating that cancer is not a genetic disease at all, but a disease of respiratory impairment (oxygen deficiency to living cells) as he first demonstrated as early as 1923?
The history of this is very well summarized in a new book
The Hidden Story of Cancer" by Brian Peskin, E.E. and Amid Habib, M.D., Pinnacle Press, Houston, Texas, 2006, 483 pages, hardbound.
In addition to providing an excellent history of the obstruction and failure of the medical orthodoxy to recognize and understand the work of the genius, Otto Warburg, these authors use new medical information on essential fatty acids to utilize the discoveries of Dr. Warburg to increase oxygen transfer across cell boundaries and hopefully prevent this horrible disease, which the medical orthodoxy of the United States has patently failed to solve for over 30 years, as proved by the fact that about one person dies every minute either from cancer, "treatment" or a combination thereof. This book also has a chapter and an appendix on why cancer is not a genetic disease, if the deaths of innocent patients by "gene therapy" trials are not proof enough for most people.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Mar 19, 2006 9:23:39 AM
Sorry about the strange formatting problems we had earlier. I think I have fixed them.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Mar 19, 2006 12:32:02 PM
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