Singham Mano - The Great Paradox of Science

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Singham, Mano, author.

Title: The great paradox of science : why its conclusions can be relied

upon even though they cannot be proven / Mano Singham.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2020] |

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021305 | ISBN 9780190055059 (hardback) |

ISBN 9780190055066 (updf) | ISBN 9780190055073 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: ScienceMethodology. | SciencePhilosophy. |

Knowledge, Theory of.

Classification: LCC Q175 .S57225 2020 | DDC 501dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021305

To my daughters Dashi and Ashali

and

my grandsons Thomas and Benjamin

The great appeal of science has been its undoubted success in enriching our lives not only in practical ways but also in showing how over time things that on the surface once seemed so inexplicable became understandable, and how vastly diverse phenomena are unified by being revealed to be based on a few underlying principles. All these seemed so fascinating to me from my early teens that I could not imagine a better way of spending my life than studying science more deeply. The world of physics, with its logical structure and underlying mathematical elegance, seemed to promise unlimited frontiers for a lifetime of fascinating investigation.

But upon graduating from high school in Sri Lanka, my hopes for entering university to pursue a physics degree lay in serious doubt because I had failed to pass a language requirement. Disappointed, I looked for a backup career to make a living and went into accountancy. During the training program, it turned out that I did quite well, mainly because the mathematics and logic involved came easily to me. I was quite comfortable with double-entry bookkeeping and could distinguish assets from liabilities and debits from credits. But my heart was not really in it. So when I overcame the language barrier at the last minute and thus qualified for university, I was elated. I went to the head of the accountancy school and told him that I was dropping out to pursue a physics degree. He tried to dissuade me, saying that he thought I was making a mistake and that I had a gift for accountancy. He then added what he must have thought was the clinching argument. He said that with accountancy, there is a fixed body of knowledge and that with diligent study one could eventually have the satisfaction of having mastered all of it. But when it came to science, one could never achieve that state and would always be left with unanswered questions. He thought I would find that extremely frustrating.

That well-meaning educator did not realize that he had said exactly the wrong thing. I can see why the prospect of a never-ending search for new knowledge, and the idea that one might never reach the goal of knowing everything in ones field of study, might be unsettling for some. But for me, that was the main allure of science, to seek and find answers to interesting and important problems, but yet never run out of fascinating questions to explore.

But after completing my undergraduate studies and then pursuing graduate work toward a doctoral degree in theoretical physics, it seemed like my idea that physics provided unlimited frontiers for exploration might be mistaken. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw one spectacular success in physics after another that raised the possibility that we were getting close to uncovering the fundamental particles that make up the universe and the underlying laws that govern their behavior. There was even talk of finding the theory of everything and even of the end of science.

Similar talk had emerged a century earlier, before the physics revolutions in relativity and quantum mechanics in the first few decades of the twentieth century shattered those expectations and opened up radically new ways of viewing the world. But hubris is part of human nature and tempts us to think that this time things are different, that we have finally got it right, and are not prone to the same errors as our predecessors. So while the scope of scientific knowledge is now so vast that no single individual can know everything, as the head of the accountancy school seemed to think was possible in his field, it seemed like as a community of scientists we were approaching a time when we would know all there is to know, at least in their broad outlines, with only mopping-up operations remaining. We seemed tantalizingly close to uncovering the ultimate truths about the nature of the universe.

I had mixed feelings about this. Scientists are puzzle-solvers at heart and while there is something exhilarating about sensing that one is close to cracking open a difficult puzzle and arriving at a solution, achieving such success, like coming to the end of an ingenious mystery novel, also brings with it a sense of anti-climax, a wistful feeling of Is that all there is? and the wish for more. The thought that future generations of scientists would not have the same excitement of tackling major open questions brought with it a tinge of sadness, similar to the sentiment expressed by eminent physicist Paul Dirac in 1939 that In 1926 it was possible for people who were not very good to solve important problems, but now people who are very good cannot find important problems to solve (Livio 2013, 159).

But after obtaining my doctorate and anticipating playing my own small role in what might possibly be the twilight of science, I stumbled upon the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn 1970) that looked more deeply at the history and philosophy of science. I was startled by Kuhns claim that while the progress of science was undeniable, there was no reason to think that there was any final frontier at all that science was progressing toward, let alone that it was a finite distance away and that we were close to it.

My prior ignorance of the work of Kuhn and other philosophers of science is not surprising. The formal study of the history and philosophy of science does not form part of the curriculum in science graduate programs. Instead, what scientists acquire is folklore about the nature of science that practicing scientists share amongst themselves and pass on to their students. This folklore is then spread to the general public via popular books, articles, and talks by scientists. My curiosity was piqued by the fact that there was a vast discrepancy between that folklore and what historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science were uncovering. This resulted in my pursuing two parallel tracks of study, physics on the one hand and philosophy of science on the other. In so doing, I became increasingly convinced that philosophers of science were shedding important light on the nature of science that needed to be better known both by scientists and the general public (Okasha 2016).