Science, Culture, and Art
The cultural nature of science is something which is too often overlooked. I was recently reading a book on creativity (Ken Robinson's Out of Our Minds) which made a very good point of this. Science is a creative enterprise which is developed and defined within a cultural context and, in turn, helps to define the culture. Though describing the same fundamental reality, the science that arose out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment is wholly different from the science that arose out of pre-World War I Europe.
Science is objective in the sense that it uses agreed-upon rules for evaluating the value of scientific principles, and these rules may be understood and examined by anyone who takes the time to look into them. This does not mean that an objective scientific claim is inherently true. For example, the notion that the Sun traveled around the Earth is an objective claim, but a false one.
Scientists bring their biases to their work, just like everyone else. The difference is that science has certain filters in place which attempt (and, I think, generally succeed) at keeping individual biases from affecting the work in too dramatic a fashion. In the case where cultural biases affect the work across the field, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn has discussed how science begins to break down and new scientific paradigms begin to take over.
But, even when the scientific framework is sound, the opposite direction works as well. Science has an impact on the culture of the time period, and in ways that go far beyond mere displays on the streets of Geneva or promotions of the latest Museum of Science & Industry exhibit on Chicago billboards. Some examples of recent direct cultural impact include:
- Satirical pieces, such as those covering the the Large Hadron Collider or the "myth" of gravitation
- World of Warcraft Offers Radical New Venue for Scientific Conference
- Enriching genuine philosophical debate over the nature and existence of God
- Neil deGrasse Tyson's work on PBS, bringing science education to the masses with shows such as NOVA ScienceNOW
- Interactive internet research initiatives such as the Einstein@Home game and the Galaxy Zoo
The twentieth century would have been a profoundly different place without radio, automobiles, airplanes, television, nuclear bombs, transistors, lasers, space travel, personal computers, and the internet ... all of which, in varying ways, are built upon the foundations of the profound physics discoveries in the first two decades of that century. The people who were formed by the twentieth century were, in large part, formed by science and technology developments.
And these creations were all reflections of the time period, of the creative impulse of the scientists working. The population of the future will be formed by scientists yet to come, whose creative impulses will lead them in new directions. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
Comments
The comments on CERN are interesting. Livermore does strangelets everday and has for years. We are looking at aggressive domain consumption and the progression toward something like “white energy” if such a term is used. We measure it by observing the light wave to sound wave conversion in its progression toward what is called “white sound”. For this type of experiment it is interesting because we get not one sound but as we progress cross-talk and harmonics. We finally recognized the progression as toward “white sound” only recently after months of mapping. Is there a similar concept for a “pure state of matter” paralleling these wave functions? Thanks for the great info.
After reflecting on my comment, I thought that I should clarify what we are doing and why. The total project responds to megajoule’s energy problems and that is where we started. Years ago around 1998, we got the light sound wave transfer in something like bubble fusion in an artificially induced electromagnetic environment. We had containment concerns and with our new element wanted to focus the process so that no energy spilled or influences the related environment. So, we set up again and for a long time as is typical nothing happened and then it started. What happened? Well, the sound started in something like registers which influenced and reset the light source. The sound was a continuous tone with intermittent subtones (we believe hits on the energy source we were seekng — no influence from ambient sound, light electrical impulse–very much like the mysterious element missing from our science). The iterations go through the register indicating all energy hits or subtones which become the basis for the crosstalk as they remain continuous with the basic tone until they are resolved and one becomes the new tone redetting at the light source frequency and going to a new register dominating by that pitch. Our assumption now is that this is linkng of the energy occurences and sources into a single focus. This is what we wanted to achieve increasing our ability to perform the interventions which are the basis for our modification of megajoule and the other naissant experiments presented as licenses at my site. We are performing a quintessential fusion which will hopefully become a single focus between our devices and the energy source. On the humourous side, the experiments also prove Einstein’s assertion that no prayer influences science as I perform my daily observances not far from the device with absolutely no sign of any influence. No sound source nor apparently other wave source has an influence and yet it radically influences all of these in its’ sphere of influence typically percieved as a cold core drops in temperature of about 20 degrees in nanoseconds. So, that is it. Some big U.S. universities show interest and some Europeans but not perticularly CERN who is very much locked into fission. Sorry, this is long. I almost never discuss the 20 years of work for proprietary reasons.