Category: nature of science

The sins of scientific specialisation

Keith S. Taber

As long ago as 1932, Albert Einstein warned about the dangers of scientific specialisation. Indeed, he drew on a Biblical analogy for the situation:

"The area of scientific investigation has been enormously extended, and theoretical knowledge has become vastly more profound in every department of science. But the assimilative power of the human intellect is and remains strictly limited. Hence it was inevitable that the activity of the individual investigator should be confined to a smaller and smaller section of human knowledge. Worse still, this specialisation makes it increasingly difficult to keep even our general understanding of science as a whole, without which the true spirit of research is inevitably handicapped, in step with scientific progress. A situation is developing similar to the one symbolically represented in the Bible by the story of the tower of Babel. Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which threatens to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrades him to the level of a mechanic."

Albert Einstein, 1932

Einstein suggested that the true scientist needs to have a basic grasp of current knowledge across the natural sciences to retain what he labels the 'true spirit' of science. I doubt many scientists would agree with this today, as, inevitably, few if any professional research scientists today could claim sufficient "general understanding of science as a whole" to, by Einstein's criterion here, avoid "the true spirit of research" being handicapped. Moreover, I doubt there are many (any?) who could claim to be the kind of polymaths that were still found two to three centuries ago, when some individuals made substantive contributions to research across a range of scientific disciplines.

The level of the mechanic?

I am sure Einstein did not intend to be derogatory about mechanics per se, but he, in effect, made a distinction between the work of the scientist and the technician. The technician may sometimes be a supreme craftsperson with highly developed technê (technical knowledge) and finely tuned skills. Scientists depend upon technicians, and often lack their expertise and level of skill in carrying out procedures.

School science teachers rely heavily on their school laboratory technicians (in those countries where they exist) and often would actually lack the knowledge and skills to source and prepare and maintain all the materials and apparatus used in practical work in their classes. But the research scientist is primarily concerned with a different, more theoretical, form of knowledge development: epsitêmê.

Professional teachers and classroom technicians

This is a distinction that resonates with many teachers. Professional teachers should be assumed to have developed a form of professional knowledge that is highly complex and enables them to critically use theory to interpret nuanced teaching situations, and make informed decisions. Too often, however, teaching is seen and discussed as only a craft where teachers can be trained and should have imposed on them detailed guidance about what and how to teach.

I have certainly seen this in England, where sometimes civil servants take advice from a small group of supposed experts 1 to develop general 'guidance' that they then think should be applied as a matter of policy by professional teachers in their various, diverse, teaching contexts. Similarly, formal inspections, where a small number of visitors spend a few days in a school or college are used to make judgements and recommendations given more weight than the collective experience of the professional staff embedded in that unique teaching context.

Of course technê and epsitêmê are rudderless without another domain of knowledge: that which helps us acquire the wisdom to live a good life – phronêsis (Martínez Sainz, 2015). The vision of the education system as something that can be subjected to atomistic, objective, evaluation and ranking, perhaps reflects the values of society that has somewhat lost sight of the most important aims of education. We do want informed citizens that have high levels of skills and that can contribute to the workforce – but unless these competent and employed people also go on to live meaningful and satisfying lives, that is all rather pointless. That is not a call to 'turn on, tune in, drop out' (as might have been suggested when I was young) but perhaps to turn on, tune in, and balance priorities: having a 'good' job is certainly worthwhile, but it only really is a 'good job' if it helps the individual live a good life.

Authorship – taking responsibility for scientific work

The technician/scientist distinction is very clear in some academic fields when it comes to publication. To be an author on a research report should signify two very important things (Taber, 2018a):

  • an author has substantially contributed intellectually to the work reported;
  • an author takes responsibility for what has been reported.

Regarding the first point, it is usually thought that when reporting research purely technical contributions (no matter how essential) do not amount to authorship. Someone who transcribes a thousand hours of interviews verbatim into a database for a researcher to interrogate does not get considered as an author for the resulting paper even if they actually spent ten times as long working with the data as the person who did the analysis – as their contribution is technical, not intellectual.

But the other side of the authorship is that authors have to stand by the work they put their name to. That does not mean their conclusions have to stand for ever – but in claiming authorship of a research report they are giving personal assurance that it is honestly reported and reflects work undertaken with proper standards of care (including proper attention to research ethics).

Read about research authorship

But, in modern science, we often find papers with a dozen, a hundred, even a thousand authors. The authors of high energy physics papers may come from theoretical and experimental physics, statistics, engineering, computer programming, … Presumably each author has made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work reported (even when in extreme cases there are so many authors that if they had all been involved in the writing process they would, on average, have contributed about a sentence each).

Each of those authors knows a good deal about their specialism – but each relies completely on the experts in other fields to be on top of their own areas. No one author could offer assurances about all the science that the paper conclusions depend upon. For example, the authors named because they programmed the computers to interpret signals rely completely upon the theoretical physicists to tell them what patterns they were looking for. In Einstein's terms, "the true spirit of research is inevitably handicapped". The many authors of such a paper, are indeed like the proverbial committee of blind people preparing a description of an elephant by coordinating and compiling a series of partial reports.

Researchers at CERN characterise the elephant boson? (Image by Mote Oo Education from Pixabay)

It is as if a research report were like the outcome of a complex algorithm, with each step (e.g., "multiply the previous answer by 0.017") coded in a different language, and carried-out by a team, each of whom only understood one of the languages involved. As long as everyone is fully competent, then the outcome should be valid, but a misstep will will not be noticed and corrected by anyone else – and will invalidate the answer.

Making the unfamiliar familiar…by comparing it to Babel

Teachers and scientists often find they need to communicate something unfamiliar, and perhaps abstract, to an audience, and look to offer a comparison with something more familiar. For this to work well, it is important that the analogue, or metaphor, or other comparison, is actually already familiar to the audience.

Read about making the unfamiliar, familiar

Einstein offers an analogy: modern science reflects the story of the Tower of Babel.

Read about scientific analogies

Einstein presumably thought that his readers were likely to be familiar with the the Tower of Babel. It has a reputation for being a place of debauchery, as in the lyric to (my 'friend') Elton's song,

"It's party time for the guys in the tower of Babel
Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel
Have a ball y'all
See the letches crawl
With the call girls under the table
Watch them dig their graves
'Cause Jesus don't save the guys
In the tower of Babel"

Extract from Bernie Taupin's lyrics for 'Tower of Babel', a song from the Elton John album 'Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy'

Taupin here conflates several biblical stories for dramatic effect (and suggests that the sins were so extreme that the sinners were beyond salvation, despite Jesus's promise to save all who truly repent). According to the Bible, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were so wicked that God destroyed the cities. (The term 'sodomy' derives from Sodom.) A sense of the level of wickedness is suggested by how the mob demanded the two Angels sent by God be handed over to be sexually abused… 2

But the alleged 'sins' of the people in the Tower of Babel were quite different in nature.

Pride comes before the falls

The original account is indeed, as Einstein suggested, Biblical. According to the narrative in Genesis, the descendants of Adam and Eve were populating the world, and formed a settlement where they set out on building a city with a brick tower to reach into the sky.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563) (Source: Wikimedia) and the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank near Manchester (Image by petergaunt2 from Pixabay)

Supposedly, God saw this, and was concerned at how the people working together in this way could achieve so much, and pondered that "this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them". God responded by disrupting society by confusing the people's common language, so they could no longer understand each other, and they abandoned the city and tower, and spread into different communities with their own languages. (This is reflected – at least, in a 'mirror universe' sense – in the New Testament account of how the Holy Spirit enabled the apostles to have the 'gift of tongues' so they could spread the Gospel without impediments from language barriers.)

The tower is believed to be one of a number of large towers known as ziggurats which functioned as both temples and astronomical observatories in Babylonian society (Freely, 2011). So, the Tower of Babel might be considered as something like our Jodrell Bank, or the Hubble telescope of its day.

So, the wrong-doing of the people in the Tower seems to be having made rapid progress towards a technological civilisation, made possible because everyone shared the same language and could effectively cooperate. That may seem an odd thing to be punished for, but this is in the tradition of the Old Testament account of a God that had already exiled humans from the paradise of the Garden of Eden as punishment for the sin (the 'fall' of humanity) of disobediently eating fruit form the tree of knowledge.

Talk, it's only talk
Babble, burble, banter
Bicker, bicker, bicker
Brouhaha, balderdash, ballyhoo
It's only talk
Back talk

From Adrian Belew's lyrics for the King Crimson song 'Elephant Talk'

The tower only become known as Babel in retrospect, from a term referring to confused talk, as in 'to babble'. This also inspired the name of the fictional 'Babel Fish' which, according to Douglas Adams, was probably the oddest thing in the Universe (as well as the basis for a mooted proof for the non-existence of God),

"It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."

Douglas Adams, from 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'
Have scientists been dispersed from a golden age of mutual comprehension?

Einstein's analogy has some bite then: we develop knowledge together when we communicate well, but once we are split into small specialist groups, each with their own technical concepts and terminology, this disrupts our ability to progress our science and technology. Whether that is a good thing, or not, depends what we do with the science, and what kinds of technologies result. This is where we need phronêsis as well as technê and epsitêmê.

Wise progress in society relies on different forms of knowledge (after Figure 2.2 from Taber, 2019)

Einstein himself would later put much effort into the cause of nuclear disarmament – having encouraged the United States to develop nuclear weapons in the context of World War 2, he later worked hard to campaign against nuclear proliferation. (Einstein wanted the US and other countries to hand over their nuclear arsenals to an international body.)

Hiroshima after the U.S. bombing

(Source: Wikimedia)

One wonders how Einstein might have reflected on his 1932 Tower of Babel analogy by the end of his life, after the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent development of the (even more destructive) hydrogen bomb? After all, as Adams reflects, the poor old Babel fish:

"by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation".

Sodom and Gomorrah afire by Jacob de Wet II, 1680 (Source: Wikimedia); and an atomic bomb explodes (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

Work cited:
  • Einstein, Albert (1932), In honor of Arnold Berliner's seventieth birthday. In Ideas and Opinions (1994), New York: The Modern Library.
  • Freely, J. (2011) Light from the East. How the science of medieval Islam helped to shape the Western World. I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd
  • Kierkegaard, Søren (1843/2014) Fear and Trembling. (Translated, Alastair Hannay) Penguin Classics.
  • Martínez Sainz, G. (2015). Teaching human rights in Mexico. A case study of educators' professional knowledge and practices [Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge].
  • Taber, Keith S. (2018). Assigning Credit and Ensuring Accountability. In P. A. Mabrouk & J. N. Currano (Eds.), Credit Where Credit Is Due: Respecting Authorship and Intellectual Property (Vol. 1291, pp. 3-33). Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society. [Can be downloaded here]
  • Taber (2019) MasterClass in Science Education: Transforming teaching and learning. London, Bloomsbury.
Notes

1 Perhaps 'supposed' is a little unfair in many cases? But, often official documents are drafted by civil servants and published as authored by faceless departments – so we may never know who the experts were; what they advised; and whether it was acted on. * So, the current English National Curriculum for science includes some 'howlers' – an incorrect statement of the principle of conservation of energy; labelling of some mixtures as being 'substances' – for which no individual has to take responsibility (perhaps explaining why the Department for Education is happy to let them stand until a major revision is due).

Read about scientific errors in the English National Curriculum

* An exception to this general pattern occurred with the 'Key Stage 3 Strategy' materials which actually included some materials which were acknowledged as authored by most respected science educators (genuine experts!) in Robin Millar and John Gilbert.

Fear and loathing in Sodom

2 According to the Biblical account, the Angels led Lot and his daughters away to safely before God destroyed the cities – with fire and sulphur. (Lot's wife famously looked back, having not had the benefit of learning from the Orpheus myth, and was lost.)

Lot had offered hospitality to the angels in his house, but the mob arrived and demanded the angels be handed over so the mob could 'know' them. Lot refused, but offered his two virgin daughters instead for the crowd to do with as they wished. (The substitution was rejected.) I imagine Søren Kierkegaard (1843) could have made much of this story, as it has echoes of Abraham's (no matter how reluctant) willingness to sacrifice his much-loved son Isaac to God; although one might argue that Lot's dilemma was more nuanced as he was dealing with a kind of 'trolley-problem', risking his daughters to try to protect guests he had offered the safety of his house, rather than simply blindingly obeying an order.

Sacrifice of Isaac (c. 1603) by Caravaggio (public domain, accessed from Wikimedia Commons), an episode open to multiple interpretations (Kierkegaard, 1843)

"It wasn't only me who blew their brains
I certainly admit to putting chains
Around their necks so they couldn't move
But there were others being quite crude
That was quite a gang waiting for the bang
I only take the blame for lighting the fuse

Now you say I'm responsible for killing them
I say it was God, He was willing them"

From the Lyrics of the song 'It Wasn't Me' (written by Steve Harley), from the Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel album 'The Best Years of Our Lives'.

The Indiscrete Quantum

Did Thomas Kuhn make a continuity error?

Keith S. Taber

Would you like to read a science joke?

At least, I think this was intended as a joke:

"A month after his return from Brussels, Poincaré [Henri Poincaré] presented to the French Academy of Sciences the first version of his own detailed proof of the necessity of discontinuity. The full version followed in January 1912, after which date French publication on the quantum, if initially sparse, is nevertheless continuous."

Kuhn, 1978/1887 (emphasis added)

This is from a book on the history of science, and, in particular, one detailing the slow process by which the notion that energy is quantised became established in physics. Quantised, here, means existing as discrete quanta – coming in distinct lumps so to speak – in the way that coinage does, but, say, tap water does not [seem to].

The author, Thomas Kuhn, is most famous for his theory of how science tends to occur within established traditions, so-called paradigms, interrupted by the occasional 'revolutionary' paradigm-shift. At the level of the individual scientist, a paradigm-shift requires the kind of gestalt-switch involved in switching one's perception of an ambiguous image.

An ambiguous figure (Image by ElisaRiva from Pixabay).

"The figure might be seen as two faces (shown in white against a black background). Or the same image (i.e., the same perceptual data) could be seen – that is interpreted – as some kind of goblet or candlestick holder (in black against a white background).

A person can learn to see either version, but not both at the same time. The brain actively organises perception to make sense of the image, and the viewer can force the 'Gestalt-shift' between the two interpretations…."

Taber, 2023, p.197

That is, there is a clear discontinuity in thinking. Understanding the earth in space as one planet among others orbiting a star requires a drastic reorganisation of thinking from seeing the earth as the centre of a universe which all revolves about it. That switch may be the outcome of a lot of deliberation and reflection – but the two paradigms are, Kuhn claimed, incommensurable. That did not mean it was not possible to compare competing paradigms, but rather that each mind-set reflected a particular perspective, and there is no neutral ground that allows a completely objective comparison.

Scientists may only slowly construct a new way of conceptualising a phenomenon or field (Thagard, 1992), but once they have, they can 'see' matters completely differently. Ironically, perhaps, Kuhn suggests that the more historical research reveals the details of how such shifts come about the more the discontinuity can be seen as the outcome of a continuous development in the scientist's thinking,

"…as almost always happens in historical reconstruction, the new narrative is more nearly continuous than its predecessor."
p.354

Kuhn, 1984/1987

So, the paradigm-shift is a kind of quantum jump in thinking. But this discontinuity is also the outcome of a gradual, continuous process. If that seems a contradiction, consider what happens if someone blows up a balloon – in both senses of 'blow up'! Inflating the balloon is a continuous process where the balloon slowly gets larger – until it 'pops'.

A balloon can be inflated to differing degrees – and can be stable at many degrees of inflation as the elastic skin stretches, creating an increasing tension that balances the effect of the increasing (excess) gas pressure inside.

However, the same process that continously inflates the balloon through a sequence of myriad possible stable states eventually leads to an internal pressure greater than the skin can tolerate, and there is a sudden catastrophic shift to a new, quite different, state (i.e., a burst balloon)

(Image by RAHIL GUPTA from Pixabay)

Kuhn was a physicist who become involved in teaching about the history of science at Harvard, and transitioned to become a historian of science. He wrote a book about the Copernican revolution (1957) – the shift from seeing the universe as earth-centred to appreciating that the earth was one subsidiary part of a sun-centred system – but his ideas about science in general progressing through such dramatic shifts were widely criticised. 1

One of the criticisms was that his model only reflected a limited number of examples of developments in physics, and could not be generalised as applying to science as a matter of course. Kuhn had not trained as a historian and his book on the Copernican revolution largely derived from his reading of secondary sources he had used in preparing lectures. (Many valuable books are primarily based on synthesising other secondary sources – but original works of academic history are based on detailed engagement with original sources such as the original scientific publications, as well as letters, diary entries, and the like.)

Kuhn's book on the 'quantum discontinuity' was intended to be serious historical scholarship. It is a detailed and evidenced account of how an idea introduced into physics as a kind of mental trick – if not perhaps a desperate stop-gap measure – slowly become accepted as actually reflecting a key aspect of the fundamental nature of the physical world.2

A second quantum revolution

Yet this was not the first quantum revolution in science. It was already widely accepted that matter was quantised – the apparently continuous nature of an iron bar or a drop of water was understood to reflect the emergence at a perceptible scale of properties that were due to the interactions of myriad tiny discrete parts. (We generally say matter is made up of tiny particles, but these are not like tiny ball bearings, but more like fuzzy concentrations of electrical fields – quanticles.)

Something that everyone today learns in school – about matter comprising of molecules and ions, that are themselves made up of protons, neutrons and electrons – was once a seemingly bizarre and wild conjecture. Even into the Twentieth Century some scientists saw the atomic hypothesis (sic) as only a useful explanatory device which did not offer a realistic description of how the world was actually structured.

Indeed, even today, it is widely considered that one of the most challenging aspects of introductory chemistry is appreciating how models of the structure and properties of matter at the nano-scale of quanticles – ions, molecules, electrons – are used to explain the very different structures and properties of matter at the familiar everyday scale (Taber, 2013).

Chemistry is a science which explains familiar phenomena through models of submicroscopic quanticles that behave in unfamiliar ways (Figure from Taber, 2013)

But scientists came to accept the 'atomic hypothesis' because it explained many phenomena, and proved successful in making predictions – leading to conjectures that could be successfully tested.

The continuous and the discrete

The distinction between what is continuous and what is discrete is generally marked in English in that mass nouns are applied to entities that are seen as continuous. So, at the perceptible scale, air and water are examples of things that are continuous. In English, then, the words 'air' and 'water' are mass nouns rather than count nouns used for countable entities (e.g., coins, chairs, plates, schools).

We can say:

  • I need some air
  • let's get a little more air
  • would you like some water?
  • I have drunk too much water

but not (usually)

  • I need another air
  • let's gets many more airs
  • Would you like any waters?
  • I have drunk too many waters

(Ironically, in the circumstances, we teach children that air is a mixture of substances comprising discrete molecules, and that water is a substance comprised of a great many molecules that are attracted to each other. So, we can refer to another molecule, or many more molecules, of water!)

  • One can do much research ('research' is a mass noun), but one cannot do many research. Although one can undertake many studies ('study 'is a count noun), which amounts to much research.
  • A person can be quite sad, or very sad (or not sad at all), but is not said to have fewer sads or more sads (or to have no sads).
  • On the other hand, a person may have many books, but not much book. Although we might say the person had much literature (not many literatures).'Book' is a count noun, where 'literature' is a mass noun. Publications (articles, books, chapters, conference papers, posters) are discrete – and both the references cited at the end of an academic work, and the individual scholar's record of publication, take the form of lists.

Of course, language is fluid (so to speak! – like water and air), and can change and become stretched or modified. We now see references to people who have done 'many researches', even if this is not (yet at least) standard use. Whilst, in English, data is plural (some data, many data), and the singular is datum (the datum, a datum) the widespread use of data as a mass noun (much data)3 has led to the respected newspaper The Financial Times giving in to the mob and deciding to use 'data' for 'datum' in future.

"…in the last few weeks something has happened that has shaken our very civilisation and made walls come tumbling down. The Financial Times…has announced that according to their style guide, henceforth 'data' will be a singular noun."

Tim Harford presenting the BBC radio programme/podcast 'More or Less' episode 'Nurses' pay, ambulance times and forgotten female economists' (Released On: 15 Feb 2023)

The quantum theory

When scientists and physics teachers refer to the quantum theory they tend to mean not the quantisation of matter, but of energy. The idea that energy might be quantised seemed counter-intuitive – even if matter came in lumps, energy was not 'stuff' and was surely continuous in nature. Energy was seen to be more like sadness than coinage.

Yet there were problems. The 'ultraviolet catastrophe' referred to how theory suggested that a 'black-body' radiator (an ideal radiator) should emit a spectrum of radiation that showed ever increasing energy output in moving to higher frequencies. That did not happen. This was not just because real radiators could only be expected to approximate to an ideal model – the discrepancy was extreme. A real hot body gave an emission spectrum with a maximum peak, and then decreasing power output at increasing frequencies (lower wavelengths); whereas theory predicted a continuously rising curve. (See the figure below.) Clearly, if hot bodies had been able to radiate with infinite power they would have cooled instantly then no one could have ever made a decent cup of tea. (Although that may not have ben the most serious concern.)

Classical theory predicted something bizarre: that thermal radiators would emit with infinite power, with the energy output increasing with increasing frequency (i.e., decreasing wavelength – read the graph from right to left) of radiation (as shown by the black curve for a body at 5000K according to classical theory). The spectra of actual radiators (other curves) have maxima, beyond which the output drops at higher frequencies (and so the area under a curve – and the energy radiated – is finite).
(Image source: By Darth Kule – Own work, Public Domain, wikimedia)

The theoretically derived spectrum was found to be quite well-matched to empirical results obtained at low enough frequencies, but once into the ultraviolet region the predictions and experimental results diverged considerably, and in a way that become even more extreme as frequency increased. Thus the term ultraviolet catastrophe.

For that matter, the simple model of the atom with orbiting electrons did not fit classical theory which predicted that an oscillating electrical charge should emit radiation (and in doing so shift to a lower energy state). These radiating atoms should (on this theory) collapse as electrons spiralled into their nuclei. Moreover, this should also happen on a very short time-scale. Clearly matter did not behave as theory predicted. There was something of a crisis in physics.

Quantum hypotheses

The idea that when matter interacts with radiation there might be restrictions on the magnitude of energy changes involved was first introduced as a kind of mathematical 'fix' to bring the theory into line with the empirical data (plural!) Only slowly did it become accepted that this was not just some mathematical trick, but part of an authentic description of how the universe actually appears to be: when a body absorbs or emits radiation this happens in discrete quanta.

That is, what was invented as a thinking tool, became seen as having significant physical significance,

"…the changed meaning of the quantity h𝜈 from

a mental subdivision of the energy continuum to

a physically separable atom of energy."

Kuhn, 1984/1987 {emphasis added}

When your desk lamp emits radiation the number of quanta involved is enormous, so it seems a continuous process – just as the shade appears to be a continuous lump of material rather than a vast conglomeration of molecules. Our experience of the effect of turning on a lamp is like observing a beach from such a great distance that the sand looks like a continuous entity – even though we know that if we went on the beach and looked very closely we would see the sand comprised of myriad tiny grains. (Tiny on our scale – still enormous on the scale of individual atoms.)

Seen from a distance, sand on a beach seems a continuous material, but under the right viewing conditions we can see it is particulate – comprised of discrete grains
(Image by Marcel from Pixabay)

But in the photoelectric effect, where the absorption of radiation can change the electrical properties of certain materials, it becomes clear that the radiation is not being absorbed as a continuous flow of energy from the radiation field, but as series of discrete events. There is a threshold frequency of light below which the effect does not occur and the radiation has no effect on the electrical properties of the material. No matter how much we turn up the intensity of light, even if we are only just below the threshold frequency, we do not see the photoelectric effect as it relies on the radiation arriving in energy-packets that are individually large enough to have an effect at the atomic level.

Consider two children standing by a garden fence behind which the neighbours are having a wild party. Imagine the brother is just too short to see over the fence, but the sister is slightly taller – above the threshold to see over the fence. The taller child observes the crazy events next door, and the longer she watches, the more she observes. However, the shorter child observes nothing. Even if he stands there for the entire evening, he will not get a glimpse, whereas the taller companion sees something – and so sees more than her brother – even if she gets bored and goes away after just a few minutes.

A visual analogy for the kind of threshold that occurs in the photoelectric effect. There is a minimum frequency of radiation (and so minimum energy quantum) needed to trigger the photoelectric effect – just as there is minimum height needed to see over the fence such that a constantly growing child will fairly rapidly transition from being too short (seeing nothing) to tall enough (seeing all there is to see).

Albert Einstein explained this as the radiation being comprised of particle-like packets of energy – the photons. Again this was, initially, widely seen as a heuristic, a way of moving research forward – and so putting aside, at least for the time being, a conceptual problem. But over time it came to be understood as something fundamental about the nature of radiation. Light, and other electromagnetic radiation, may have wave-like aspects, but a full description has to account for its particle-like nature as well.

A physics pun?

Kuhn's book on 'Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity' is centrally about the way this idea of radiated energy being discontinuous gradually moved

  • from being a stop-gap heuristic (i.e., treat energy as quantised for the moment) of the kind scientists often use to allow them to make progress despite a conceptual problem they will need to return to at some point
    • (to put an inconsistency into 'quarantine' to use the metaphor suggested by Imre Lakatos)
  • to become seen as a fundamental truth about the nature of the universe: energy, in interacting with matter, is quantised.

In this sense, energy is more like coins than sadness– more like studies than research.

And, in physics, studies are generally published in the research literature as 'papers' – reports of research, each described in a discrete and self-contained article.4 The wider literature also includes books and book chapters and conference papers – but these are also all discrete entities, even when they collectively reflect an author's slowly shifting perspective on some topic.

As Kuhn was centrally writing about the transition from radiation understood as something continuous to radiation understood as energy quantised in discrete photons, something discontinuous, he was clearly well aware of this distinction. Indeed, the 'Quantum Discontinuity' of his title was itself a kind of pun, that could refer either

  • to how the quantisation physics describes reflects a discontinuous process – or
  • to the paradigm shift in understanding among the physics community in accepting quantisation as a physical description.

There was a discontinuity in both developing scientific thinking about the physics, and in the physical nature of the universe itself.

'French publication' was not continuous

"French publication" on the quantum, whether sparse or dense, would have occurred through a sequence of discrete publications (and, so, as distinct events separated in time by intervals). "French publication" on the quantum – however, we might be able to describe these events: infrequent, occasional, regular, sporadic – was not continuous.

Or, perhaps better, French publications on the quantum were not continuous?

Surely, Kuhn would not have slipped-up in this regard? More likely he was deliberately adopting a loose use of 'continuous' as a kind of pun in contrast to the discrete quanta the publications discussed.

Taking a historical overview from a distance of some decades (like viewing the sand on the beach from a passing boat) the flow of publications about quanta might blur into seeming a continuous stream – perhaps this can be seen as a kind of inverse effect to how Kuhn suggests detailed historical scholarship could reveal the gradual, incremental progression in thinking that led to a revolutionary conceptual rupture.

In the history of science, as in the investigation of matter and energy, whether something appears as a continuum or not very much depends upon the scale at which we view and the grain size at which we sample. And much the same has been found in science education research exploring learners' developing ideas (Taber, 2008).

Coda: data are like energy

Dr Beth Malory, a lecturer in English Linguistics at UCL, commenting on the change in house style at The Financial Times referred to above, suggested that a corpus analysis of the occurrence of the word 'data' in accessible published texts indicates that "for most people, data is a mass noun" – that is, in general use people are much more likely to write "data is" instead of the formally correct "a datum is"/"data are". She made the following intriguing comparison,

"Something like energy or air would be a good analogy for it [data]."

Dr Beth Malory interviewed by Tim Harford on the BBC radio programme/podcast 'More or Less' episode 'Reoffending rates, Welsh taxes and the menopause' (Released On: 22 Feb 2023)

I doubt she had in mind that energy and air, like sand, and indeed like data themselves, are – if you investigate them closely enough – quantised.

Work cited

Notes

1 For scholars in the humanities, being widely criticised is not to be understood as an entirely negative thing. Primarily, it means people have noticed your work, and they think it is significant enough to be challenged: so many scholars would think that being widely criticised is to be welcomed! For that matter, having other scholars publish work criticising your scholarship can be a justification for seeking to publish a response to their criticisms and, so, an opportunity for developing and further disseminating your own ideas.

This might be seen as the academic equivalent of Oscar Wilde's quip that

the only thing worse than being talked about, was not being talked about!

2 Another example of a 'fudge factor come good' might be the 'cosmological constant' that Albert Einstein introduced into his theories to give the equations a form that fitted the assumed nature of the universe. Einstein later considered this his greatest blunder – but other physicists have found ways to interpret the cosmological constant as relating to important, observable features of the universe.

3 I suspect, often, data is actually being used as a collective noun (akin to the committee, the council, the population {nouns which refer to a (singular) group of people}; the swarm, the herd, the flock, the shoal, etc.), where 'the data' refers to the particular 'data set' ('dataset') being discussed.

4 Contributions to the literature are expected to build upon, and cite, existing work in a field – but each research report should set out a coherent and complete, self-contained argument to support its conclusions.

Read about research writing

Experimental pot calls the research kettle black

Do not enquire as I do, enquire as I tell you

Keith S. Taber

Sotakova, Ganajova and Babincakova (2020) rightly criticised experiments into enquiry-based science teaching on the grounds that such studies often used control groups where the teaching methods had "not been clearly defined".

So, how did they respond to this challenge?

Consider a school science experiment where students report comparing the rates of reaction of 1 cm strips of magnesium ribbon dropped into:
(a) 100 ml of hydrochloric acid of 0.2 mol/dm3 concentration at a temperature of 28 ˚C; and
(b) some unspecified liquid.

This is a bit like someone who wants to check they are not diabetic, but – being worried they are – dips the test strip in a glass of tap water rather than their urine sample.

Basic premises of scientific enquiry and reporting are that

  • when carrying out an experiment one should carefully manage the conditions (which is easier in laboratory research than in educational enquiry) and
  • one should offer detailed reports of the work carried out.

In science there is an ideal that a research report should be detailed enough to allow other competent researchers to repeat the original study and verify the results reported. That repeating and checking of existing work is referred to as replication.

Replication in science

In practice, replication is more problematic for both principled and pragmatic reasons.

It is difficult to communicate tacit knowledge

It has been found that when a researcher develops some new technique, the official report in the literature is often inadequate to allow researchers elsewhere to repeat the work based only on the published account. The sociologist of science, Harry Collins (1992) has explored how there may be minor (but critical) details about the setting-up of apparatus or laboratory procedures that the original researchers did not feel were significant enough to report – or even that the researchers had not been explicitly aware of. Replication may require scientists to physically visit each others' laboratories to learn new techniques.

This should not be surprising, as the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1962/1969) long ago argued that science relied on tacit knowledge (sometimes known as implicit knowledge) – a kind of green fingers of the laboratory where people learn ways of doing things more as a kind of 'muscle memory' than formal procedural rules.

Novel knowledge claims are valued

The other problem with replication is that there is little to be gained for scientists by repeating other people's work if they believe it is sound, as journals put a premium on research papers that claim to report original work. Even if it proves possible to publish a true replication (at best, in a less prestigious journal), the replication study will just be an 'also ran' in the scientific race.

Copies need not apply!

Scientific kudos and rewards go to those who produce novel work: originality is a common criterion used when evaluating reports submitted to research journals

(Image by Tom from Pixabay)

Historical studies (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011) show that what actually tends to happen is that scientists – deliberately – do not exactly replicate published studies, but rather make adjustments to produce a modified version of the reported experiment. A scientist's mind set is not to confirm, but to seek a new, publishable, result,

  • they say it works for tin, so let's try manganese?
  • they did it in frogs, let's see if it works in toads?
  • will we still get that effect closer to the boiling point?
  • the outcome in broad spectrum light has been reported, but might monochromatic light of some particular frequency be more efficient?
  • they used glucose, we can try fructose

This extends (or finds the limits of) the range of application of scientific ideas, and allows the researchers to seek publication of new claims.

I have argued that the same logic is needed in experimental studies of teaching approaches, but this requires researchers detailing the context of their studies rather better than many do (e.g., not just 'twelve year olds in a public school in country X'),

"When there is a series of studies testing the same innovation, it is most useful if collectively they sample in a way that offers maximum information about the potential range of effectiveness of the innovation. There are clearly many factors that may be relevant. It may be useful for replication studies of effective innovations to take place with groups of different socio-economic status, or in different countries with different curriculum contexts, or indeed in countries with different cultural norms (and perhaps very different class sizes; different access to laboratory facilities) and languages of instruction …It may be useful to test the range of effectiveness of some innovations in terms of the ages of students, or across a range of quite different science topics. Such decisions should be based on theoretical considerations.

…If all existing studies report positive outcomes, then it is most useful to select new samples that are as different as possible from those already tested…When existing studies suggest the innovation is effective in some contexts but not others, then the characteristics of samples/context of published studies can be used to guide the selection of new samples/contexts (perhaps those judged as offering intermediate cases) that can help illuminate the boundaries of the range of effectiveness of the innovation."

Taber, 2019, pp.104-105

When scientists do relish replication

The exception, that tests the 'scientists do not simply replicate' rule, is when it is suspected that a research finding is wrong. Then, an attempt at replication might be used to show a published account is flawed.

For example, when 'cold fusion' was announced with much fanfare (ahead of the peer reviewed publications reporting the research) many scientists simply thought it was highly unlikely that atomic energy generation was going to be possible in fairly standard glassware (not that unlike the beakers and flasks used in school science) at room temperature, and so that there was a challenge to find out what the original researchers had got wrong.

"When it was claimed that power could be generated by 'cold fusion', scientists did not simply accept this, but went about trying it for themselves…Over a period of time, a (near) consensus developed that, when sufficient precautions were made to measure energy inputs and outputs accurately, there was no basis for considering a new revolutionary means of power generation had been discovered.

Taber, 2020, p.18

Of course, one failed replication might just mean the second team did not quite do the experiment correctly, so it may take a series of failed replications to make the point. In this situation, being the first failed replication of many (so being first to correct the record in the literature) may bring prestige – but this also invites the risk of being the only failed replication (so, perhaps, being judged a poorly executed replication) if subsequently other researchers confirm the fidnings of the original study!

So, a single attempt at replication is nether enough to definitely verify nor reject a published result. What all this does show is that the simple notion that there are crucial or critical experiments in science which once reported immediately 'prove' something for all time is a naïve oversimplification of how science works.

Experiments in education

Experiments are often the best way to test ideas about natural phenomena. They tend to be much less useful in education as there are often many potentially relevant variables that usually cannot be measured, let alone controlled, even if they can be identified.

  • Without proper control, you do not have a meaningful experiment.
  • Without a detailed account of the different treatments, and so how the comparison condition is different from the experimental condition, you do not have a useful scientific report, but little more than an anecdote.
Challenges of experimental work in classrooms

Despite this, the research literature includes a vast number of educational studies claiming to be experiments to test this innovation or that (Taber, 2019). Some are very informative. But many are so flawed in design or execution that their conclusions rely more on the researchers' expectations than a logical chain of argument from robust evidence. They often use poorly managed experimental conditions to find differences in learning outcomes between groups of students that are initially not equivalent. 1 (Poorly managed?: because there are severe – practical and ethical – limits on the variables you can control in a school or college classroom.)

Read about expectancy effects in research

Statistical tests are then used which would be informative had there been a genuinely controlled experiment with identical starting points and only the variable of interest being different in the two conditions. Results are claimed by ignoring the inconvenient fact that studies use statistical tests that, strictly, do not apply in the actual conditions studied! Worse than this, occasionally the researchers think they should have got a positive result and so claim one even when the statistical tests suggests otherwise (e.g., read 'Falsifying research conclusions')! In order to try and force a result, a supposed innovation may be compared with control conditions that have been deliberately framed to ensure the learners in that condition are not taught well!

Read about unethical control conditions

A common problem is that it is not possible to randomise students to conditions, so only classes are assigned to treatments randomly. As there are usually only a few classes in each condition (indeed, often only one class in each condition) there are not enough 'units of analysis' to validly use statistical tests. A common solution to this common problem, is…to do the tests anyway, as if there had been randomisation of learners. 2 The computer that crunches the numbers follows a programme that has been written on the assumption researchers will not cheat, so it churns out statistical results and (often) reports significant outcomes due to a misuse of the tests. 3

This is a bit like someone who wants to check they are not diabetic, but being worried they are, dips the test strip in a glass of tap water rather than their urine sample. They cannot blame the technology for getting it wrong if they do not follow the proper procedures.

I have been trying to make a fuss about these issues for some time, because a lot of the results presented in the educational literature are based upon experimental studies that, at best, do not report the research in enough detail, and often, when there is enough detail to be scrutinised, fall well short of valid experiments.

I have a hunch that many people with scientific training are so convinced of the superiority of the experimental method, that they tacitly assume it is better to do invalid experiments into teaching, than adopt other approaches which (whilst not as inherently convincing as a well-designed and executed experiment) can actually offer useful insights in the complex and messy context of classrooms. 4

Read: why do natural scientists tend to make poor social scientists?

So, it is uplifting when I read work which seems to reflect my concerns about the reliance on experiments in those situations where good experiments are not feasible. In that regard, I was reading a paper reporting a study into enquiry-based teaching (Sotakova, Ganajova & Babincakova, 2020) where the authors made the very valid criticism:

"The ambiguous results of research comparing IBSE [enquiry-based science education] with other teaching methods may result from the fact that often, [sic] teaching methods used in the control groups have not been clearly defined, merely referred to as "traditional teaching methods" with no further specification, or there has been no control group at all."

Sotakova, Ganajova & Babincakova, 2020, p.500

Quite right!

The pot calling the kettle black

idiom "that means people should not criticise someone else for a fault that they have themselves" 5 (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pot-calling-the-kettle-black)

(Images by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)

Now, I do not want to appear to be the pot calling the kettle black myself, so before proceeding I should acknowledge that I was part of a major funded research project exploring a teaching innovation in lower secondary science and maths teaching. Despite a large grant, the need to enrol a sufficient number of classes to randomise to treatments to allow statistical testing meant that we had very limited opportunities to observe, and so detail, the teaching in the control condition, which was basically the teachers doing their normal teaching, whilst the teachers of the experimental classes were asked to follow a particular scheme of work.

Results from a randomised trial showing the range of within-condition outcomes (After Figure 5, Taber, 2019)

In the event, the electricity module I was working on produced almost identical mean outcomes as the control condition (see the figure). The spread of outcomes was large, in both sets of conditions – so, clearly, there were significant differences between individual classes that influenced learning: but these differences were even more extreme in the condition where the teachers were supposed to be teaching the same content, in the same order, with the same materials and activities, than in the control condition where teachers were free to do whatever they thought best!

The main thing I learned from this experience is that experiments into teaching are highly problematic.

Anyway, Sotakova, Ganajova and Babincakova were quite right to point out that experiments with poorly defined control conditions are inadequate. Consider a school science experiment designed by students who report comparing the rates of reaction of 1 cm strips of magnesium ribbon dropped into

  • (a) 100 ml of hydrochloric acid of 0.2 mol/dm3 concentration at a temperature of 28 ˚C; and
  • (b) some unspecified liquid.

A science teacher might be disappointed with the students concerned, given the limited informativeness of such an experiment – yet highly qualified science education researchers often report analogous experiments where some highly specified teaching is compared with instruction that is not detailed at all.

The pot decides to follow the example of the kettle

So, what did Sotakova and colleagues do?

"Pre-test and post-test two-group design was employed in the research…Within a specified period of time, an experimental intervention was performed within the experimental group while the control group remained unaffected. The teaching method as an independent variable was manipulated to identify its effect on the dependent variable (in this case, knowledge and skills). Both groups were tested using the same methods before and after the experiment…both groups proceeded to revise the 'Changes in chemical reactions' thematic unit in the course of 10 lessons"

Sotakova, Ganajova & Babincakova, 2020, pp.501, 505.

In the experimental condition, enquiry-based methods were used in five distinct activities as a revision approach (an example activity is detailed in the paper). What about the control conditions?

"…in the control group IBSE was not used at all…In the control group, teachers revised the topic using methods of their choice, e.g. questions & answers, oral and written revision, textbook studying, demonstration experiments, laboratory work."

Sotakova, Ganajova & Babincakova, 2020, pp.502, 505

So, the 'control' condition involved the particular teachers in that condition doing as they wished. The only control seems to be that they were asked not to use enquiry. Otherwise, anything went – and that anything was not necessarily typical of what other teachers might have done. 6

This might have involved any of a number of different activities, such as

  • questions and answers
  • oral and written revision
  • textbook studying
  • demonstration experiments
  • laboratory work

or combinations of them. Call me picky (or a blackened pot), but did these authors not complain that

"The ambiguous results of research comparing IBSE [enquiry-based science education] with other teaching methods may result from the fact that often…teaching methods used in the control groups have not been clearly defined…"

Sotakova, Ganajova & Babincakova, 2020, p.500

Hm.

Work cited
Notes:

1 A very common approach is to use a pre-test to check for significant differences between classes before the intervention. Where differences between groups do not reach the usual criterion for being statistically significant (probability, p<0.05) the groups are declared 'equivalent'. That is, a negative result in a test for unlikely differences is treated inappropriately as an indicator of equivalence (Taber, 2019).

Read about testing for initial equivalence

2 So, for example, a valid procedure may be to enter the mean class scores on some instrument as data, but what are actually entered are the individual students scores as though the students can be treated as independent units rather than members of a treatment class.

Some statistical tests lead to a number (the statistic) which is then compared with the critical value that reaches statistical significance as listed in a table. The number in the table selected depends on the number of 'degrees of freedom' in the experimental design. Often that should be the determined by the number of classes involved in the experiment – but if instead the number of learners is used, a much smaller value of the calculated statistic will seem to reach significance.

3 Some of these studies would surely have given positive outcomes even if they had been able to randomise students to conditions or used a robust test for initial equivalence – but we cannot use that as a justification for ignoring the flaws in the experiment. That would be like claiming a laboratory result was obtained with dilute acid when actually concentrated acid was used – and then justifying the claim by arguing that the same result might have occurred with dilute acid.

4 Consider, for example, a case study that involves researchers in observing teaching, interviewing students and teachers, documenting classroom activities, recording classroom dialogue, collecting samples of student work, etc. This type of enquiry can offer a good deal of insight into the quality of teaching and learning in the class and the processes at work during instruction (and so whether specific outcomes seem to be causally linked to features of the innovation being tested).

Critics of so-called qualitative methods quite rightly point out that such approaches cannot actually show any one approach is better than others – only experiments can do that. Ideally, we need both types of study as they complement each other offering different kinds of information.

The problem with many experiments reported in the education literature is that because of the inherent challenges of setting up genuinely fair testing in educational contexts they are not comparing like with like, and often it is not even clear what the comparison is with! Probably this can only be avoided in very large scale (and so expensive) studies where enough different classrooms can be randomly assigned to each condition to allow statistics to be used.

Why do researchers keep undertaking small scale experimental studies that often lack proper initial equivalence between conditions, and that often have inadequate control of variables? I suggest they will continue to do so as long as research journals continue to publish the studies (and allow them to claim definitive conclusions) regardless of their problems.

5 At a time when cooking was done on open fires, using wood that produced much smoke, the idiom was likely easily understood. In an age of ceramic hobs and electric kettles the saying has become anachronistic.

From the perspective of thermal physics, black cooking pots (rather than shiny reflective surfaces) may be a sensible choice.

6 So, the experimental treatment was being compared with the current standard practice of the teachers assigned to the control condition. It would not matter so much that this varies between teachers, nor that we do not know what that practice is, if we could be confident that the teachers in the control condition were (or were very probably) a representative sample of the wider population of teachers – such as a sufficiently large number of teachers randomly chosen from the wider population (Taber, 2019). Then we would at least know whether the enquiry based approach was an improvement on current common practice.

All we actually know is how the experimental condition fared in comparison with the unknown practices of a small number of teachers who may or may not have been representative of the wider population.

A hundred percent conclusive science

Estimation and certainty in Maisie's galaxy

Keith S. Taber

An image from the James Webb Space Telescope
(released images are available at https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images)

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is now operational, and offering new images of 'deep space'. This has led to claims of finding images of objects from further away in the Universe, and so from further back in time, than previously seen. This should support a lot of new scientific work and will surely lead to some very interesting findings. Indeed, it seems to have had an almost immediate impact.

Maisie's galaxy

One of these new images is of an object known as:

CEERSJ141946.35-525632.8

or less officially (but more memorably) as

Masie's galaxy.

A red smudge on one of the new images has been provisionally identified as evidence of a galaxy as it was less than 300 000 000 years after the conjectured 'big bang' event understood as the origin of the universe. The galaxy is so far away that its light has taken since then to reach us.

Three hundred million years seems a very long time in everyday terms, but it a small fraction of the current age of the universe, believed to be around fourteen billion years. 1

300 000 000 years

≪ 14 000 000 000 years

The age estimate is based on the colour of the object, reflecting its 'redshift':

"Scientists with the CEERS Collaboration have identified an object–dubbed Maisie's galaxy in honor of project head Steven Finkelstein's daughter–that may be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed. If its estimated redshift of 14 is confirmed with future observations, that would mean we're seeing it as it was just 290 million years after the Big Bang."

University of Texas at Austin, UT News, August 04, 2022

(CEERS is the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey.)

This finding is important in understanding the evolution of the universe – for example, observing the earliest galaxies puts a limit on how long the universe existed before star formation started. (Although the episode was called 'The first galaxies at the universe's dawn' Masie's galaxy is thought to contain heavier elements that were produced in even earlier stars.)

Uncertainty in science (and certainty in reporting science)

So, the claim is provisional. It is an estimate awaiting confirmation.

Strictly, science is concerned with provisional knowledge claims. This is not simply because scientists can make mistakes. All measurements are subject to limits in precision (measurement 'errors'). More fundamentally, all measurements depend on a theory of the instrumentation used, and theoretical knowledge is always open to being revisited on the basis of new ways of understanding.

We may not expect the theory behind the metre rule to change any time soon (although even there, our understanding shifted somewhat with Einstein's theories) but many scientific observations depend on highly complex apparatus, both for data collection and analysis. Despite this, science is often represented in the media, both by commentators and sometimes scientists themselves, as if it produced absolute certainty.

Read about science in public discourse and the media

Read about scientific certainty in the media

A rough estimate?

In the case of Maisie's galaxy, the theoretical apparatus seems to be somewhat more sophisticated than the analytical method used to provisionally age the object. This was explained by Associate Professor Steve Finkelstein when he was interviewed on the BBC's Science in Action episode 'The first galaxies at the universe's dawn'.

Masie's galaxy – it's quite red.
The first galaxies at the universe's dawn. An episode of 'Science in Action'

Professor Finkelstein explained:

"We can look deep into out past by taking these deep images, and we can find the sort of faintest red smudges and that tells us that they are extremely far away, and from exactly how red they are we can estimate that distance."

Associate Professor Steve Finkelstein

So, the figure of 290 000 000 years after the big bang is an estimate. Fair enough, but what 'caught my ear', so to speak, was the contrast between the acknowledged uncertainty of the current estimate, and the claimed possibility of moving from this to absolute knowledge,

"If this distance we have measured for Masie's galaxy, of a red shift of 14, holds true, and I can't stress enough that we need spectroscopic confirmation to precisely measure that distance. [*] Where you take a telescope, could be James Webb, could be a different telescope, you observe it [the galaxy] and you split the light into its component colours, and you can actually precisely measure – measure the red shift, measure the distance – a hundred percent conclusively."

Associate Professor Steve Finke
[* To my ear, there might well be an edit at this point – the quote is based on what was broadcast which might omit or re-sequence parts of the interview.]

Spectroscopic analysis allows us to compare the pattern of redshifted spectral lines due to the presence of elements absorbing or emitting radiation, with the position of those lines as they are found without any shift. Each element has its own pattern of lines – providing a metaphorical fingerprint. A redshift (or blueshift) moves these lines to different parts of the spectrum, but does not change their collective profile as all the lines are moved to the same extent.

Spectral lines can be used like fingerprints to identify substances.
(Image by No-longer-here from Pixabay)

Some of these lines are fine, allowing precise measurements of wavenumber/frequency, and there are enough of them to be able to make very confident assignments of the 'fingerprints', and use this to estimate the shift. We might extend our analogy to a fingerprint on a rubber balloon which had been stretched since a fingerprint was made. In absolute terms, the print would no longer (or 'no wider' for that matter) fit the finger that made it, but the distortion is systematic allowing a match to be made – and the degree of stretching to be calculated.

If a pattern is distorted in a systematic way, we may still be able to match it to an undistorted version
(Original images by Clker-Free-Vector-Images (balloon), OpenClipart-Vectors (print) and Alexander (notepad) from Pixabay)

Yet, even though this is a method that is considered well-understood, reliable, and potentially very accurate and precise 2, I am not sure you can "precisely measure, measure the redshift, measure the distance. A hundred percent conclusively". Science, at least as I understand it, always has to maintain some small level of humility.

Scientists may be able to confirm and hone the estimate of 290 000 000 years after the big bang for the age of Maisie's galaxy. Over time, further observations, new measurements, refinement in technique, or even theory, may lead to successive improvements in that age measurement and both greater accuracy and greater precision.2 But any claim of a conclusive measurement to a precision of 100% has a finality that sounds like something other than science to me.

Notes

1 Oddly, most webages I've seen that cite values for the age of the universe do not make it explicit whether these are American (109) or English (1012) billions! It seems to be assumed that, as with sulfur [i.e., sulphur], and perhaps soon aluminum and fosforus, we are all using American conventions.

2 Precision and accuracy are different. Consider an ammeter.

An ammeter (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

Due to the method of reading a needle position against a scale there is a limit to precision (perhaps assumed to the nearest calibration, so to ±0.5 calibrations). This measurement error of ±0.5 units is, in effect, a limit in detail or resolution, but not an 'error' in the everyday sense of getting something wrong. However, if the meter had been miscalibrated, or over time has shifted from calibration, so the needle is misaligned (so perhaps the meter reads +0.15 A when it is not connected into a circuit) then that is inaccuracy. There is always some level of imprecision (some limit on how precise we can be), even when we have an accurate reading.

In science, a measurement normally offers a best estimate of a true value, with an error range acknowledging how far the real value might be from that best estimate. See the example below: Measurement B claims the most precision, but is actually inaccurate. Measurement A is the most accurate (but least precise).

If we imagine that a galaxy was being seen as it was

275 000 000 years after the big bang

and three measurements of its age were given as:

A: 280 000 000 ± 30 000 000 years after the big bang

(i.e., 250 000 000 – 310 000 000)

B: 290 000 000 ± 10 000 000 years after the big bang

(i.e., 280 000 000 – 300 000 000)

C: 260 000 000 ± 20 000 000 years after the big bang

(i.e., 240 000 000 – 280 000 000)

then measurement B is more precise (it narrows down the possible range the most) but is inaccurate (as the actual age falls outside the range of this measurement). Of course, unlike in such a hypothetical example, in a real case we would not know the actual age to allow us to decide which of the measurements is more accurate.

What Homo erectus did next

Can we be certain about something that happened half a million years ago?

Keith S. Taber

What was going on in Java when Homo erectus lived there? (Image by Kanenori from Pixabay )

About half a million years ago a hominid, of the Homo erectus species, living in Java took a shell and deliberately engraved a mark on it. Now, I was not there when this happened, so my testimony is second hand, but I can be confident about this as I was told by a scientist that she was sure that this definitely happened.

"…we knew for sure that it must have been made by Homo erectus"

But how can we be so sure about something alleged to have occurred so long ago?

"A long time ago [if not] in a galaxy far, far away…." the skull of a specimen of Homo erectus (Image by Mohamed Noor from Pixabay ) [Was this an inspiration for the Star Wars stormtrooper helmet?]

I doubt Fifi would be convinced.1 Fifi was a Y12 student (c.16 years old) interviewed as part of the LASAR project who had reservations about palaeontology as it did not provide certain scientific knowledge,

"I like fossils though, I think they're interesting but I don't think I'd really like [working as a palaeontologist]…I don't think you could ever really know unless you were there… There'll always be an element of uncertainty because no matter how much evidence you supply there will always be, like, doubt because of the fact that you were never there…there'll always be uncertainty."

Fifi quoted in Taber, Billingsley & Riga, 2020, p.57

Learners can have alternative conceptions of the nature of science, just as much as they often do for forces or chemical bonding or plant nutrition. They often think that scientific knowledge has been 'proved', and so is certain (e.g., Taber, Billingsley, Riga & Newdick, 2015). An area like palaeontology where direct observation is not possible may therefore seem to fall short of offering genuine scientific knowledge.

The uncertain nature of scientific knowledge

One key feature of the nature of science is that it seeks to produce general or theoretical knowledge of the natural world. That is, science is not just concerned with providing factual reports about specific events but with developing general accounts that can explain and apply to broad categories of objects and events. Such general and theoretical knowledge is clearly more useful than a catalogue of specific facts – which can never tell us about the next occasion or what might happen in hypothetical situations.

However, a cost of seeking such applicable and useful knowledge is that it can never be certain. It relies on our ways of classifying objects and events, the evidence we have collected so far, our ability to spot the most important patterns -and the deductions this might support. So, scientific knowledge is always provisional in the sense that it is open to revision in response to new data, or new ways of thinking about existing data as evidence.

Read about the nature of scientific knowledge

Certainty and science in the media

Yet often reports of science in the media give the impression that science has made absolute discoveries. Some years ago I wrote about the tendency in science documentaries for the narrative to be driven by links that claimed "...this could only mean…" when we know that in science the available data always underdetermines theory (Taber, 2007). Or, to put it another way, we could always think up other ways of explaining the data. Sometimes these alternatives might seem convoluted and unlikely, but if we can suggest a possible (even when unconvincing) alternative, then the available data can never "only mean" any one particular proposed interpretation.

Read about scientific certainty in the media

Fossils from Java

Prof. Joordens who reported on how a shell had been deliberately marked by a member of the Homo erectus species hundreds of thousands of years ago.

(taken from her website at https://www.naturalis.nl/en/science/researchers/jose-joordens )

The scientist concerned was J.C.A (José) Joordens who is Professor in Hominin Paleoecology and Evolution, at Maastricht University. Prof. Joordens holds the Naturalis Dubois Chair in Hominin Paleoecology and Evolution. The reference to Dubois relates to the naturist responsible for finding a so-called 'missing link' in the chain of descent to modern humans,

"One of the most exciting episodes of palaeoanthropology was the find of the first transitional form, the Pithecanthropus erectus, by the Dutchman Eugène Dubois in Java during 1891-1892. …Besides the human remains, Dubois made a large collection of vertebrate fossils, mostly of mammals, now united in the so-called Dubois Collection."

de Vos, 2004

The Java man species, Pithecanthropus erectus (an upright ape/mokey-man), was later renamed as Homo erectus, the upright man.

'In Our Time' episode on Homo erectus

On an edition of BBC Radio 4's 'In Our Time' taking 'Homo erectus' as its theme, Prof. Joordens explained how some fossil shells collected by Dubois as part of the context of the hominid fossils had remained in storage for over a century ("The shells had been, well, shelved…"!), before a graduate student set out to photograph them all for a thesis project. This led to the discovery that one of the shells appeared to have been engraved.

This could only mean one thing…

This is what Prof. Joordens told the host, Melvyn Bragg,

"One shell that had a very strange marking that we could not understand how it ended up there…

It was geometric, like a W, and this is of course something that animals don't produce. We had to conclude that it must have been made by Homo erectus. And it must have been a very deliberate marking because of, we did experimental research trying to replicate it, and then we actually found it was quite hard to do. Because, especially fresh shells, they have a kind of organic exterior, and it's hard to push some sharp objects through and make those lines, so that was when we knew for sure that it must have been made by Homo erectus."

Prof. José Joordens talking on 'In Our Time'

We may consider this claim to be composed of a number of components, such as:

  • There is a shell with some 'very strange' markings
  • The shell was collected in Java in the nineteenth century
  • The shell had the markings when first collected
  • The markings were not caused by some natural phenomenon
  • The markings were deliberate not accidental
  • The markings were made by a specimen of Homo erectus

A sceptic might ask such questions as

  • How can we be sure this shell was part of the original collection? Could it have been substituted by mistake or deliberately?
  • How do we know the marks were not made more recently? perhaps by someone in the field in Java, or during transit form Java to the Netherlands, or by someone inspecting the collection?
  • Given that even unusual markings will occur by chance occasionally, how can we be certain these markings were deliberate? Does the mark really look like a 'W 'or might that be an over-interpretation. 2

And so forth.

It is worth bearing in mind that no one noticed these markings in the field, or when the collection was taken back to the Netherlands – indeed Prof. Joordens noted she had carried the shell around in her backpack (could that have been with an open penknife?) unaware of the markings

Of course, Prof. Joordens may have convincing responses to many of these questions – but a popular radio show is not the place to detail all the argument and evidence. Indeed, I found a report in the top journal Nature ('Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving') by Prof. Joordens and her team 3, claiming,

"One of the Pseudodon shells, specimen DUB1006-fL, displays a geometric pattern of grooves on the central part of the left valve [*]. The pattern consists, from posterior to anterior, of a zigzag line with three sharp turns producing an 'M' shape, a set of more superficial parallel lines, and a zigzag with two turns producing a mirrored 'N' shape. Our study of the morphology of the zigzags, internal morphology of the grooves, and differential roughness of the surrounding shell area demonstrates that the grooves were deliberately engraved and pre-date shell burial and weathering"

Joordens et al, 2015, p.229

[* Photgraphs are included in the paper. Some can also be seen at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/oldest-engraving-shell-tools-zigzags-art-java-indonesia-humans-180953522/ ]

It may seem most likely that the markings were made by a Homo erectus, as no other explanation so far considered fits all the data, but theory is always under-determined – one can never be certain another scenario might be found which also fits the known facts.

Strictly, Prof. Joordens' contradicts herself. She claims the marks are "something that animals don't produce" and then claims an animal is responsible. She presumably meant that no non-hominid animal makes such marks. Even if we accept that (and, as they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence 4), can we be absolutely certain some other hominid might not have been present in Java at the time, marking the odd shell? As the 'In Our Time' episode discussed, Homo erectus often co-existed with other hominids.

Probably not, but … can we confidently say absolutely, definitely, not?

As Fifi might say: "I don't think you could ever really know unless you were there".

My point is not that I think Prof. Joordens is wrong (she is an expert, so I think she is likely correct), but just that her group cannot be absolutely certain. When Prof. Joordens says she knows for sure I assume (because she is a scientist, and I am a scientist) that this means something like "based on all the evidence currently available, our best, and only convincing, interpretation is…" Unfortunately lay people often do not have the background to insert such provisos themselves, and so often hear such claims literally – science has proved its case, so we know for sure. Where listeners already think scientific knowledge is certain, this misconception gets reinforced.

Meanwhile, Prof. Joordens continues her study of hominids in Java in the Studying Homo erectus Lifestyle and Location project (yes, the acronym is SHeLL).

Work cited:
Notes

1 As is usual practice in such research, Fifi is an assumed name. Fifi gave permission for data she contributed to the research to be used in publications on the assumption it would be associated with a pseudonym. (See: 'Using pseudonyms in reporting research'.)

2 No one is suggesting that the hominid deliberately marked the shell with a letter of the Roman alphabet, just that s/he deliberately made a mark that represented a definite and deliberate pattern. Yet human beings tend to spot patterns in random data. Could it just be some marks that seem to fit into a single pattern?

3 Josephine C. A. Joordens, Francesco d'Errico, Frank P. Wesselingh, Stephen Munro, John de Vos, Jakob Wallinga, Christina Ankjærgaard, Tony Reimann, Jan R. Wijbrans, Klaudia F. Kuiper, Herman J. Mücher, Hélène Coqueugniot, Vincent Prié, Ineke Joosten, Bertil van Os, Anne S. Schulp, Michel Panuel, Victoria van der Haas, Wim Lustenhouwer, John J. G. Reijmer & Wil Roebroeks.

4 At one time there was no evidence of 'noble' gases reacting. At one time there was no evidence of ozone depletion. At one time there was no evidence of superconductivity. At one time there was no evidence that the blood circulates around the body. At one time there was no evidence of any other planet having moons. At one time there was no evidence of protons being composed of even more fundamental particles. At one time there was no evidence of black holes. At one time there was no evidence that smoking tobacco was harmful. At one time there was no evidence of … [fill in your choice scientific discovery!]

A discriminatory scientific analogy

Animals and plants as different kinds of engines

Keith S. Taber

Specimens of two different types of natural 'engines'.
Portrait of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1603-65 (Anthony van Dyck: From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository)

In this post I discuss a historical scientific analogy used to discuss the distinction between animals and plants. The analogy was used in a book which is said to be the first major work of philosophy published in the English language, written by one of the founders of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge ('The Royal Society'), Sir Kenelm Digby.

Why take interest in an out-of-date analogy?

It is quite easy to criticise some of the ideas of early modern scientists in the light of current scientific knowledge. Digby had some ideas which seem quite bizarre to today's reader, but perhaps some of today's canonical scientific ideas, and especially more speculative theories being actively proposed, may seem equally ill-informed in a few centuries time!

There is a value in considering historical scientific ideas, in part because they help us understand a little about the path that scientists took towards current scientific thinking. This might be valuable in avoiding the 'rhetoric of conclusions', where well-accepted ideas become so familiar that we come to take them for granted, and fail to appreciate the ways in which such ideas often came to be accepted in the face of competing notions and mixed experimental evidence.

For the science educator there are added benefits. It reminds us that highly intelligent and well motivated scholars, without the value of the body of scientific discourse and evidence available today, might sensibly come up with ideas that seem today ill-conceived, sometimes convoluted, and perhaps even foolish. That is useful to bear in mind when our students fail to immediately understand the science they are taught and present with alternative conceptions that may seem illogical or fantastic to the teacher. Insight into the thought of others can help us consider how to shift their thinking and so can make us better teachers.

Read about historical scientific conceptions

Analogies as tools for communicating science

Analogies are used in teaching and in science communication to help 'make the unfamiliar familiar', to show someone that something they do not (yet) know about is actually, in some sense at least, a bit like something they are already familiar with. In an analogy, there is a mapping between some aspect(s) of the structure of the target ideas and the structure of the familiar phenomenon or idea being offered as an analogue. Such teaching analogies can be useful to the extent that someone is indeed highly familiar with the 'analogue' (and more so than with the target knowledge being communicated); that there is a helpful mapping across between the analogue and the target; and that comparison is clearly explained (making clear which features of the analogue are relevant, and how).

Read about scientific analogies

Nature made engines

Digby presents his analogy for considering the difference between plants and animals in his 'Discourse on Bodies', the first part of his comprehensive text known as his 'Two Discourses' completed in 1644, and in which he sets out something of a system of the world.1 Although, to a modern scientific mind, many of Digby's ideas seem odd, and his complex schemes sometimes feel rather forced, he shared the modern scientific commitment that natural phenomena should be explained in terms of natural causes and mechanisms. (That is certainly not to suggest he was an atheist, as he was a committed Roman Catholic, but he assumed that nature had been set up to work without 'occult' influences.)

Before introducing an analogy between types of living things and types of engines, Digby had already prepared his readers by using the term 'engine' metaphorically to refer to living things. He did this after making a distinction between matter dug out of the ground as a single material, and other specimens which although highly compacted into single bodies of material clearly comprised of "differing parts" that did not work together to carry out any function, and seemed to have come together by "chance and by accident"; and where, unlike in living things (where removed parts tended to stop functioning), the separate parts could be "severed from [one] another" without destroying any underlying harmonic whole. He contrasted these accidental complexes with,

"other bodies in which this manifest and notable difference of parts, carries with it such subordination of one of them unto another, as we cannot doubt but that nature made such engines (if so I may call them) by design; and intended that this variety should be in one thing; whole unity and being what it is, should depend of the harmony of the several differing parts, and should be destroyed by their separation".

Digby emphasising the non-accidental structure of living things (language slightly tidied for a modern reader).

Digby was writing long before Charles Darwin's work, and accepted the then widely shared idea that there was design in nature. Today this would be seen as teleological, and not appropriate in a scientific account. A teleological account can be circular (tautological) if the end result of some process is explained as due to that process having a purpose. [Consider the usefulness as an 'explanation' that 'oganisms tend to become more complex over time as nature strives for complexity'. 2]

Read about teleology

Scientists today are expected to offer accounts which do not presuppose endpoints. That does not mean that a scientists cannot believe there is purpose in the world, or even that the universe was created by a purposeful God – simply that scientific accounts cannot 'cheat' by using arguments that something happens because God wished it, or nature was working towards it. That is, it should not make any difference whether a scientist believes God is the ultimate cause of some phenomena (through creating the world, and setting up the laws of nature) as science is concerned with the natural 'mechanisms' and causes of events.

Read about science and religion

Two types of engines

In the part of his treatise on bodies that concerns living things, Digby gives an account of two 'engines' he had seen many years before when he was travelling in Spain. This was prior to the invention of the modern steam engine, and these engines were driven by water (as in water mills). 3

Digby introduces two machines which he considers illustrate "the natures of these two kinds of bodies [i.e., plants and animals]"

He gives a detailed account of one of the engines, explaining that the mechanism has one basic function – to supply water to an elevated place above a river.

  • 1/4
  • 2/4
  • 3/4
  • 4/4

His other engine example (apparently recalled in less detail – he acknowledges having a "confused and cloudy remembrance" ) was installed in a mint in a mine where it had a number of different functions, including:

  • producing metal of the correct thickness for coinage
  • stamping the metal with the coinage markings
  • cutting the coins from the metal
  • transferring the completed coins into the supply room.

These days we might see it as a kind of conveyor belt moving materials through several specialist processes.

Different classes of engine

Digby seems to think this is a superior sort of engine to the single function example.

For Digby, the first type of engine is like a plant,

"Thus then; all sorts of plants, both great and small, may be compared to our first engine of the waterwork at Toledo, for in them all the motion we can discern, is of one part transmitting unto the next to it, the juice which it received from that immediately before it…"

Digby comparing a plant to a single function machine

The comments here about juice may seem a bit obscure, as Digby has an extended explanation (over several pages) of how the growth and structure of a plant are based on a single kind of vascular tissue and a one-way transport of liquid. 4 Liquid rises up through the plant just as it was raised up by the mechanism at Toldeo

The multi-function 'engine' (perhaps ironically better considered in today's terms as an industrial plant!) is however more like an animal,

"But sensible living creatures, we may fitly compare to the second machine of the mint at Segovia. For in them, though every part and member be as it were a complete thing of itself, yet every one requires to be directed and put on in its motion by another; and they must all of them (though of very different natures and kinds of motion) conspire together to effect any thing that may be for the use and service of the whole. And thus we find in them perfectly the nature of a mover and a moveable; each of them moving differently from one another, and framing to themselves their own motions, in such sort as is more agreeable to their nature, when that part which sets them on work hath stirred them up.

And now because these parts (the movers and the moved) are parts of one whole; we call the entire thing automaton or…a living creature".

Digby comparing animals to more complex machines (language slightly tidied for a modern reader)

So plants were to animals as a single purpose mechanism was to a complex production line.

Animals as super-plants

Digby thought animals and plants shared in key characteristics of generation (we would say reproduction), nutrition, and augmentation (i.e., growth), as well as suffering sickness, decay and death. But Digby did not just think animals were different to plants, but a superior kind.

He explains this both in terms of the animal having functions that be did not beleive applied to plants,

And thus you see this plant [sic] has the virtue both of sense or feeling; that is, of being moved and affected by external objects lightly striking upon it; as also of moving itself, to or from such an object; according as nature shall have ordained.

but he also related to this as animals being more complex. Whereas the plant was based on a vascular system involving only one fluid, this super-plant-like-entity, had three. In summary,

this plant [sic, the animal] is a sensitive creature, composed of three sources, the heart, the brain, and the liver: whose are the arteries, the nerves, and the veins; which are filled with vital spirits, with animal spirits, and with blood: and by these the animal is heated, nourished, and made partaker of sense and motion.

A historical analogy to explain the superiority of animals to plants

[The account here does not seem entirely consistent with other parts of the book, especially if the reader is supposed to associate a different fluid with each of the three systems. Later in the treatise, Digby refers to Harvey's work about circulation of the blood (including to the liver), leaving the heart through arteries, and to veins returning blood to the heart. His discussion of sensory nerves suggest they contain 'vital spirits'.]

Some comments on Digby's analogy

Although some of this detail seems bizarre by today's standards, Digby was discussing ideas about the body that were fairly widely accepted. As suggested above, we should not criticise those living in previous times for not sharing current understandings (just as we have to hope that future generations are kind to our reasonable mistakes). There are, however, two features of this use of analogy I thought worth commenting on from a modern point of view.

The logic of making the unfamiliar familiar

If such analogies are to be used in teaching and science communication, then they are a tactic we can use to 'make the unfamiliar familiar', that is to help others understand what are sometimes difficult (e.g., abstract, counter-intuitive) ideas by pointing out they are somewhat like something the person is already familiar with and feels comfortable that they understand.

Read about teaching as 'making the unfamiliar familiar'

In a teaching context, or when a scientist is being interviewed by a journalist, it is usually important that the analogue is chosen so it is already familiar to the audience. Otherwise either the analogy does not help explain anything, or time has to be spent first explaining the analogy, before it can be employed.

In that sense, then, we might question Digby's example as not being ideal. He has to exemplify the two types of machines he is setting up as the analogue before he can make an analogy with it. Yet this is not a major problem here for two reasons.

Firstly, a book affords a generosity to an author that may not be available to a teacher or a scientist talking to a journalist or public audience. Reading a book (unlike a magazine, say) is a commitment to engagement in depth and over time, and a reader who is still with Digby by his Chapter 23 has probably decided that continued engagement is worth the effort.

Secondly, although most of his readers will not be familiar with the specific 'engines' he discusses from his Spanish travels, they will likely be familiar enough with water mills and other machines and devices to readily appreciate the distinction he makes through those examples. The abstract distinction between two classes of 'engine' is therefore clear enough, and can then be used as an analogy for the difference between plants and animals.

A biased account

However, today we would not consider this analogy to be applicable, even in general terms, leaving aside the now discredited details of plant and animal anatomy and physiology. An assumption behind the comparison is that animals are superior to plants.

In part, this is explained in terms of the plants apparent lack of sensitivity (later 'irritability' would be added as a characteristic of living things, shared by plants) and their their lack of ability in getting around, and so not being able to cross the room to pick up some object. In part, this may be seen as an anthropocentric notion: as humans who move around and can handle objects, it clearly seems to us with our embodied experience of being in the world that a form of life that does not do this (n.b., does not NEED to do this) is inferior. This is a bit like the argument that bacteria are primitive forms of life as they have evolved so little (a simplification, of course) over billions of years: which can alternatively be understood as showing how remarkably adapted they already were, to be able to successfully occupy so many niches on earth without changing their basic form.

There is also a level of ignorance about plants. Digby saw the plant as having a mechanism that moved moisture from the soil through the plant, but had no awareness of the phloem (only named in the nineteenth century) that means that transport in a plant is not all in one direction. He also did not seem to appreciate the complexity of seasonal changes in plants which are much more complex than a mechanism carrying out a linear function (like lifting water to a privileged person who lives above a river). He saw much of the variation in plant structures as passive responses to external agents. His idea of human physiology are also flawed by today's standards, of course.

Moreover, in Digby's scheme (from simple minerals dug from the ground, to accidentally compacted complex materials, to plants and then animals) there is a clear sense of that long-standing notion of hierarchy within nature.

The great chain of being

That is, the great chain of being, which is a system for setting out the world as a kind of ladder of superior and inferior forms. Ontology is sometimes described as the study of being , and typologies of different classes of entities are sometimes referred to as ontologies. The great chain of being can be understood as a kind of ontology distinguishing the different types of things that exist – and ranking them.

Read about ontology

In this scheme (or rather schemes, as various versions with different levels of detail and specificity had been produced – for example discriminating the different classes of angels) minerals come below plants, which come below animals. To some extent Digby's analogy may reflect his own observations of animals and plants leading him to think animals were collectively and necessarily more complex than plants. However, ideas about the great chain of being were part of common metaphysical assumptions about the world. That is, most people took it for granted that there was such hierarchy in nature, and therefore they were likely to interpret what they observed in those terms.

Digby made the comparison between increasing complexity in moving from plant to animal as being a similar kind of step-up as when moving from inorganic material to plants,

But a sensitive creature, being compared to a plant, [is] as a plant is to a mixed [inorganic] body; you cannot but conceive that he must be compounded as it were of many plants, in like sort as a plant is of many mixed bodies.

Digby, then, was surely building his scheme upon his prior metaphysical commitments. Or, as we might say these days, his observations of the world were 'theory-laden'. So, Digby was not only offering an analogy to help discriminate between animals and plants, but was discriminating against plants in assuming they were inherently inferior to animals. I think that is a bias that is still common today.

Work cited:
  • Digby, K. (1644/1665). Two Treatises: In the one of which, the nature of bodies; In the other, the nature of mans soule, is looked into: in ways of the discovery of the immortality of reasonable soules. (P. S. MacDonald Ed.). London: John Williams.
  • Digby, K. (1644/2013). Two Treatises: Of Bodies and of Man's Soul (P. S. MacDonald Ed.): The Gresham Press.
  • Taber, K. S. & Watts, M. (2000) Learners' explanations for chemical phenomena, Chemistry Education: Research and Practice in Europe, 1 (3), pp.329-353. [Free access]
Notes:

1 This is a fascinating book with many interesting examples of analogies, similes, metaphor, personification and the like, and an interesting early attempt to unify forces (here, gravity and magnetism). (I expect to write more about this over time.) The version I am reading is a 2013 edition (Digby, 1644/2013) which has been edited to offer consistent spellings (as that was not something many authors or publishers concerned themselves with at the time). The illustrations, however, are from a facsimile of an original publication (Digby, 1644/1645: which is now out of copyright so can be freely reproduced).

2 Such explanations may be considered as a class of 'pseudo-explanations': that give the semblance of explanation without actually explaining very much (Taber & Watts, 2000).

3 The aeolipile (e.g., Hero's engine) was a kind of steam engine – but was little more than a novelty where water boiled in a vessel with suitably directed outlets and free to rotate, causing it to spin. However, the only 'useful' work done was in turning the engine itself.

4 This relates to his broader theory of matter which still invokes the medieval notion of the four elements, but is also an atomic theory involving tiny particles that can pass into apparently solid materials due to pores and channels much too small to be visible.

Viruses may try to hide, but

other microbes are not accepting defeat

Keith S. Taber

viruses might actually try to…hide…
the microbes did not just accept defeat, they have been mounting their resistance

qutoes from an 'Inside Science' episode
A recent episode of the BBC radio programme/podcast inside science

I was catching up on the BBC Radio 4 science programme/podcast 'Inside Science' episode 'Predicting Long Covid, and the Global Toll of Antimicrobial Resistance' (first broadcast 27 January 2022) and spotted anthropomorphic references to microbes in two different items.

What is anthropomorphism?

Anthropomorphic language refers to non-human entities as if they have human experiences, perceptions, and motivations. Both non-living things and non-human organisms may be subjects of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism may be used deliberately as a kind of metaphorical language that will help the audience appreciate what is being described because of its similarly to some familiar human experience. In science teaching, and in public communication of science, anthropomorphic language may often be used in this way, giving technical accounts the flavour of a persuasive narrative that people will readily engage with. Anthropomorphism may therefore be useful in 'making the unfamiliar familiar', but sometimes the metaphorical nature of the language may not be recognised, and the listener/reader may think that the anthropomorphic description is meant to be taken at face value. This 'strong anthropomorphism' may be a source of alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') of science.

Read about anthropomorphism

Viruses may try to hide from the immune system

The first example was from the lead story about 'long COVID'.

Prof. Onur Boyman, Director of the Department of Immunology at the University Hospital, Zurich, was interviewed after his group published a paper suggesting that blood tests may help identify people especially susceptible to developing post-acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) syndrome (PACS) – which has become colloquially known as 'long COVID'.

"We found distinct patterns of total immunoglobulin (Ig) levels in patients with COVID-19 and integrated these in a clinical prediction score, which allowed early identification of both outpatients and hospitalized individuals with COVID-19 that were at high risk for PACS ['long COVID']."

Cervia, Zurbuchen, Taeschler, et al., 2022, p.2

The study reported average patterns of immunoglobulins found in those diagnosed with COVID-19 (due to SARS-CoV-2 infection), and those later diagnosed with PACS. The levels of different types of immunoglobulins (designated as IgM, etc.) were measured,

Differentiating mild versus severe COVID-19, IgM was lower in severe compared to mild COVID-19 patients and healthy controls, both at primary infection and 6-month follow-up… IgG3 was higher in both mild and severe COVID-19 cases, compared to healthy controls …In individuals developing PACS, we detected decreased IgM, both at primary infection and 6-month follow-up… IgG3 tended to be lower in patients with PACS…which was contrary to the increased IgG3 concentrations in both mild and severe COVID-19 cases…

Cervia, Zurbuchen, Taeschler, et al., 2022, p.3

Viruses in a defensive mode

In the interview, Professor Boyman discussed how features of the immune system, and in particular immunoglobulins, were involved in responses to infection, and made the comment:

"IgG3…is smaller than IgM and therefore it is able to go into many more tissues. It is able to cross certain tissue barriers and go into those sites where viruses might actually try to go to and hide"

Prof. Onur Boyman interviewed on 'BBC Inside Science'
Micro-organisms trying to hide? (Image by WikiImages from Pixabay )

This is anthropomorphic as it refers to viruses trying to hide from the immune components. Of course, viruses are not sentient, so they do not try to do anything: they have no intentions. Although viruses might well pass across tissue barriers and move into tissues where they are less likely to come into contact with immunoglobulins, 'hiding' suggests a deliberate behaviour – which is not the case.

Professor Boyman is clearly aware of that, and either deliberately or otherwise was speaking metaphorically. Scientifically literate people would not be misled by this as they would know viruses are not conscious agents. However, learners are not always clear about this.

The bacteria, however, are going on the offensive

The other point I spotted was later in the same programme when the presenter, Gaia Vince, introduced an item about antibiotic resistance:

"Back in my grandparent's time, the world was a much more dangerous place with killer microbes lurking everywhere. People regularly died from toothache, in childbirth, or just a simple scratch that got infected. But at the end of the second world war, doctors had a new miracle [sic] drug called penicillin. Antibiotics have proved a game changer, taking the deadly fear away from common infections. But the microbes did not just accept defeat, they have been mounting their resistance and they are making a comeback."

Gaia Vince presenting 'Inside Science'

Antibiotics are generally ineffective against viruses, but have proved very effective treatments for many bacterial infections, including those that can be fatal when untreated. The functioning of antibiotics can be explained by science in purely natural terms, so the label of 'miracle drugs' is a rhetorical flourish: their effect must have seemed like a miracle when they first came into use, so this can also be seen as metaphoric language.

Read about metaphors in science

Bacteria regrouping for a renewed offensive? (Image by WikiImages from Pixabay )

However, again the framing is anthropomorphic. The suggestion that microbes could 'accept defeat' implies they are the kind of entities able to reflect on and come to terms with a situation – which of course they are not. The phrase 'mounting resistance' also has overtones of deliberate action – but again is clearly meant metaphorically.

Again, there is nothing wrong with these kinds of poetic flourishes in presenting science. Most listeners would have heard "microbes did not just accept defeat, they have been mounting their resistance and they are making a comeback" and would have spontaneously understood the metaphoric use of language without suspecting any intention to suggest microbes actually behave deliberately. Such language supports the non-specialist listener in accessing a technical science story.

Some younger listeners, however, may not have a well-established framework for thinking about the nature of an organism that is able to reflect on its situation and actively plan deliberate behaviours. After all, a good deal of children's literature relies on accepting that various organisms, indeed non-living entities such as trains, do have human feelings, motives and behavioural repertoires. (Learners may for example think that evolutionary adaptations, such as having more fur in a cold climate, are mediated by conscious deliberation.) Popular science media does a good job of engaging and enthusing a broad audience in science, but with the caveat that accessible accounts may be open to misinterpretation.

Work cited:

Should we trust an experiment that suggests a stone can eat iron?

Is it poor scientific practice to explain away results we would not expect?

Keith S. Taber

how convinced would be be by a student who found an increase in mass after burning some magnesium and argued that this showed that combustion was a process of a substance consuming oxygen as a kind of food

I came across an interesting account of an experiment which seemed to support a hypothesis, but where the results were then explained away to reject the hypothesis.

An experiment to test whether a lodestone buried in iron filings will get heavier
Experimental results always need interpretation

That might seem somewhat dubious scientific practice, but one of the things that becomes clear when science is studied in any depth is that individual experiments seldom directly decide scientific questions. Not only is the common notion that a positive result proves a hypothesis correct over-simplistic, but it is also seldom the case that a single negative result can be assumed to be sufficient to reject a hypothesis. 1

Given that, the reason I thought this report was interesting is that it was published some time ago, indeed in 1600. It also put me in mind of a practical commonly undertaken in school science to demonstrate that combustion involves a substance combining with oxygen. In that practical activity (commonly mislabelled as an 'experiment' 2), magnesium metal (for example) is heated inside a ceramic crucible until it has reacted, and by careful weighing it is found (or perhaps I should say, it should be found, as it can be a challenging practical for the inexperienced) that the material after combustion weighs more than before – as the magnesium has reacted with a substance from the air (oxygen).3 This is said to give support to the oxygen theory of combustion, and to be contrary to the earlier phlogiston theory which considered flammable materials to contain a substance called phlogiston which was released during combustion (such that what remains is of less mass than before).

Testing whether lodestones eat iron

The historical experiment that put me in mind of this involved burying a type of stone known as a lodestone in iron filings. The stone and filings were carefully weighed before burial and then again some months later after being separated. The hypothesis being tested was that the weight of the lodestone would increase, and there would be a corresponding decrease in the mass of the weight of the iron filings. Apparently at the end of the experiment the measurements, strictly at least, suggested that this was what had occurred. Yet, despite this, the author presenting the account dismissed the result – arguing that it was more likely the finding was an artifact of the experimental procedure either not being sensitive enough, or not having been carried out carefully enough.

Explaining away results – in science and in school laboratories

That might seem somewhat against the spirit of science – I wonder if readers of this posting feel that is a valid move to make: to dismiss the results, as if scientists should be fee to pick and chose which results they wish to to take notice of?

But I imagine the parallel situation has occurred any number of times in science classrooms, for example where the teacher responds to students' practical demonstrations that what is left after burning magnesium has less mass than the magnesium had before. Rather than seeing this as a refutation of the oxygen hypothesis (actually now, of course, canonical theory) – and possible support for the notion that phlogiston had been released – the teacher likely explains this away as either a measurement error or, more likely, a failure to retain all of the magnesia [magnesium oxide] in the crucible for the 'after' measurement.

Hungry magnets

The historical example is discussed in William Gilbert's book about magnetism, usually known in English as 'On the magnet'. 4 This is sometimes considered the first science book, and consists of both a kind of 'literature review' of the topic, as well as a detailed report of a great many observations and demonstrations that (Gilbert claims) were original and made by Gilbert himself. There were no professional scientists in 1600, and Gilbert was a physician, a medical practitioner, but he produced a detailed and thoughtful account of his research into magnets and magnetism.

Gilbert's book is fascinating to a modern reader for its mixture of detailed accounts that stand today (and many of which the reader could quite easily repeat) alongside some quite bizarre ideas; and as an early example of science writing that mixes technical accounts with language that sometimes seems quite unscientific by today's norms – including (as well as a good deal of personification and anthropomorphism) some very unprofessional remarks about some other scholars he considers mistaken. Gilbert certainly has little time for philosophers ('philosophizers') who set out theories about natural phenomena without ever undertaking any observations or tests for themselves.

Lodestones

Magnetism has been known since antiquity. In particular, some samples of rock (usually samples of magnetite, now recognised as Fe3O4) were found to attract both each other and samples of iron, and could be used as a compass as they aligned, more or less, North-South when suspended, or when floated in water (in a makeshift 'boat'). Samples of this material, these naturally occurring magnets, were known as lodestones.

Yet the nature of magnetism, seemingly an occult power that allowed a stone to attract an iron nail, or the earth to turn a compass needle, without touching it, remained a mystery. Some of the ideas that had been suggested may seem a little odd today.

Keepers as nutrients?

So, for example, it is common practice to store magnets with 'keepers'. A horseshoe magnet usually has a steel rod placed across its ends, and bar magnets are usually stored in pairs with steel bars making a 'circuit' by connecting between the N of one magnet with the S of the other. But why?

One idea, that Gilbert dismisses is that the magnet (lodestone) in effect needs a food source to keep up its strength,

"The loadstone is laid up in iron filings, not that iron is its food; as though loadstone were alive and needed feeding, as Cardan philosophizes; nor yet that so it is delivered from the inclemency of the weather (for which cause it as well as iron is laid up in bran by Scaliger; mistakenly, however, for they are not preserved well in this way, and keep for years their own fixed forms): nor yet, since they remain perfect by the mutual action of their powders, do their extremities waste away, but are cherished & preserved, like by like."

Gilbert, 1600 – Book 1, Chapter 16.

Girolamo Cardano was an Italian who had written about the difference between amber (which can attract small objects due to static electrical charges) and lodestones, something that Gilbert built upon. However, Gilbert was happy to point out when he thought 'Cardan' was mistaken.

An experiment to see if iron filings will feed a magnet

Gilbert reports an experiment carried out by Giambattista della Porta. Porta's own account is that:

"Alexander Aphrodiseus in the beginning of his Problems, enquires wherefore the Loadstone onely draws Iron, and is fed or helped by the fillings of Iron; and the more it is fed, the better it will be: and therefore it is confirmed by Iron. But when I would try that, I took a Loadstone of a certain weight, and I buried it in a heap of Iron-filings, that I knew what they weighed; and when I had left it there many months, I found my stone to be heavier, and the Iron-filings lighter: but the difference was so small, that in one pound I could finde no sensible declination; the stone being great, and the filings many: so that I am doubtful of the truth."

Porta, 1658: Book 7, Chapter 50

Gilbert reports Porta's experiment in his own treatise, but adds potential explanations of why the iron filings had slightly lost weight (it is very easy to lose some of the material during handling), and why the magnet might be slightly heavier (it could have become coated in some material during its time buried),

"Whatever things, whether animals or plants, are endowed with life need some sort of nourishment, by which their strength not only persists but grows firmer and more vigorous. But iron is not, as it seemed to Cardan and to Alexander Aphrodiseus, attracted by the loadstone in order that it may feed on shreds of it, nor does the loadstone take up vigour from iron filings as if by a repast on victuals [i.e., a meal of food]. Since Porta had doubts on this and resolved to test it, he took a loadstone of ascertained weight, and buried it in iron filings of not unknown weight; and when he had left it there for many months, he found the stone of greater weight, the filings of less. But the difference was so slender that he was even then doubtful as to the truth. What was done by him does not convict the stone of voracity [greediness, great hunger], nor does it show any nutrition; for minute portions of the filings are easily scattered in handling. So also a very fine dust is insensibly born on a loadstone in some very slight quantity, by which something might have been added to the weight of the loadstone but which is only a surface accretion and might even be wiped off with no great difficulty."

Gilbert, 1600 – Book 2, Chapter 25.
Animistic thinking

To a modern reader, the idea that a lodestone might keep up its strength by eating iron filings seems very fanciful – and hardly scientific. To refer to the stone feeding, taking food, or being hungry, is animistic – treating the stone as though it is a living creature. We might wonder if this language is just being used metaphorically, as it seems unlikely that intelligent scholars of the 16th Century could actually suspect a stone might be alive. Yet, as Gilbert points out, there was a long tradition of considering that the lodestone, being able to bring about movement, had a soul, and Gilbert himself seemed to feel this was not so 'absurd'.

A reasonable interpretation?

We should always be aware of the magnitude of likely errors in our measurements, and not too easily accept results at the margins of what can be measured. Gilbert's suggestions for why the test of whether mass would be transferred from the iron to the magnet might have given flawed positive results seem convincing. It would be easy to lose some of the filings in the experiment: especially if the "heap of Iron-filings" was left for several months without any containment! And the lodestone could indeed easily acquire some extraneous material that needed to be cleaned off to ensure a valid weighing. As the lodestone attracts iron, all of the filings would need to be carefully cleaned from it (and returned to the 'heap' before the re-weighing).

But, I could not help but wonder if, in part at least, I found Gilbert's explaining away of the results as reasonable, simply because I found the premise of the iron acting as a kind of food as ridiculous. We should bear in mind that although the predicted change in mass was motivated by a notion of the magnet needing nutrition, that might not be the only scenario which might give rise to the same prediction. 1 After all, how convinced would be be by a student who

  • suggested combustion was a process of a substance consuming oxygen as a kind of food, and
  • therefore predicted that magnesium would be found to have got heavier after a good meal, and
  • subsequently found an increase in mass after burning some magnesium, and
  • argued that this gave strong support for the oxygen-as-food principle?

Coda

It is rather difficult for us today to really judge how language was used centuries ago. Do these natural philosophers talking of magnets eating iron mean this literally, or is it just figurative – intended as a metaphor that readers would understand suggested that there was a process somewhat akin to when a living being eats? 5 Some of them seemed quite serious about assigning souls to entities we today would conspire obviously inanimate. But we should be careful of assuming apparently incredible language was meant, or understood, literally.

In the same week as I was drafting this posting I read an article in Chemistry World about how the heavier elements are produced, which quoted Professor Brian Metzer, physicist at Columbia University,

"What makes the gamma-ray burst in both of these cases [merging neutron stars and the collapse of large rapidly rotating stars] is feeding a newly-formed black hole matter at an extremely high rate…The process that gives rise to the production of this neutron-rich material is actually outflows from the disc that's feeding the black hole."

Brian Metzer quoted in Wogan, 2022

If we would be confident that Professor Metzer meant 'feeding a black hole' to be understood figuratively, we should be careful to reserve judgement on how the feeding of lodestones was understood when Porta and Gilbert were writing.

Sources cited:
Notes:

1 Strictly scientific tests never 'prove' or 'disprove' anything.

The notion of 'proof' is fine in the context of purely theoretical disciplines such as in mathematics or logic, but not in science which tests ideas empirically. Experimental results always underdetermine theories (that is, it is always possible to think up other theories which also fit the results, so a result never 'proves' anything). Apparently negative results do not refute ('disprove') a theory either, as any experimental test of a hypothesis also depends upon other factors (Has the researcher been sloppy? Is the measuring instrument valid – and correctly calibrated? Are any simplifying assumptions reasonable in the context…). So experimental results offer support for, or bring into question, specific theoretical ideas, without ever being definitive.

2 An experiment is undertaken to test a hypothesis. Commonly in school practical work 'experiments' are carried out to demonstrate an accepted principle, such that it is already determined what the outcome 'should' be – students may have already been told the expected outcome, it appears i n their textbooks, and the title of the activity may be suggestive ('to show that mass increases on combustion'). Only if there is a genuine uncertainty about the outcome should the activity be labelled an experiment – e.g., it has been suggested that combustion is like the fuel eating oxygen, in which case things should be heavier after burning – so let's weigh some magnesium, burn it, and then re-weight what we have left (dephlogisticated metal?; compound of metal with oxygen?; well-fed metal?)

3 Mass and weight are not the same thing. However, in practice, measurements of weight made in the laboratory can be assumed as proxy measurements for mass.

4 As was the norm in European scholarship at that time, Gilbert wrote his treatise in Latin – allowing scholars in different countries to read and understand each other's work. The quotations given here are from the 1900 translation into English by S.P. Thompson.

5 Such metaphors can act as communication tools in 'making the unfamiliar familiar' and as thinking tools to help someone pose questions (hypotheses?) for enquiry. There is always a danger, however, that once such figures of speech are introduced they can channel thinking, and by providing a way of talking about and thinking about some phenomena they can act as obstacles to delving deeper in their nature (Taber & Watts, 1996).

When being almost certain is no better than a guess

Scientific discourse and the media

Keith S. Taber

"I picked up that phrase 'almost certainly due to lack of vaccine', I mean that sounds like a bit of guesswork."

Presenter on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme

Yesterday, I was drafting a post about how a scientist had referred to a scientific theory being 'absolutely certain'. I suggested that this seemed at odds with the nature of science as producing conjectural knowledge always open to revisiting – yet might be considered necessary when seeking to communicate in public media.

Today, I sadly heard an excellent example to support that thesis.

BBC Radio 4's Today programme included an interview with Dr Raghib Ali

That example concerned Nick Robinson (BBC journalist, and former Political Editor) introducing an interview with Dr Raghib Ali on the radio news programme, 'Today'. Dr Ali is a Senior Clinical Research Associate at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.

Robinson: "Now one of the first things we learned when the pandemic began, was that a greater proportion of Black and South Asian people were dying from corona virus. That remains the case many months on, but a new government report out today argues that the mortality gap now is mainly due, is not due, I'm sorry, to any genetic or social factor, it is, and I quote almost certainly down to vaccine take-up, or more accurately a lack of vaccine take-up. We're joined now by the government's independent expert advisor on COVID-19 and ethnicity, Dr. Raghib Ali, who is a consultant in acute medicine at Oxford University Hospitals. Morning to you"

Dr Ali: "Good morning Nick."

Robinson:"I picked up that phrase 'almost certainly due to lack of vaccine', I mean that sounds like a bit of guesswork. Do we actually know that?"

Nick Robinson interviewing Dr Raghib Ali on Today, 3rd December 2021, c.08.46

This seems to show a worrying level of ignorance (or else an odd provocation) from a senior and experienced journalist expecting scientific studies to be able to offer certain knowledge about causes in complex multivariate social situations.

How a scientific claim was understood on a prestigious news magazine programme

Yesterday, I was asking whether Dr Friederike Otto should have referred to scientists knowing something with 'absolute certainty' when speaking in the broadcast media. Today I heard an example of how the media can treat any scientific claim that is not framed as being absolutely certain.

Sadly, if the news media are only interested in absolute certainty, then they should stop talking to scientists about their work as absolute certainty has no place in scientific discourse. Nor should it, I might suggest, have a place in serious journalism.

Climate change – either it is certain OR it is science

Is there a place for absolute certainty in science communication?

Keith S. Taber

I just got around to listening to the podcast of the 10th October episode of Science in Action. This was an episode entitled 'Youngest rock samples from the moon' which led with a story about rock samples collected on the moon and brought to earth by a Chinese mission (Chang'e-5). However, what caused me to, metaphorically at least, prick up my ears was a reference to "absolute certainty".

BBC Science in Action episode, 10th October, 2021

Now the tag line for Science in Action is "The BBC brings you all the week's science news". I think that phrase reveals something important about science journalism – it may be about science, but it is journalism, not science.

That is not meant as some kind of insult. But science in the media is not intended as science communication between scientists (they have journals and conferences and so forth), but science communicated to the public – which means it has to be represented in a form suitable for a general, non-specialist audience.

Read about science in public discourse and the media

Scientific and journalistic language games

For, surely, "all the week's science news" cannot be covered in one half-hour broadcast/podcast. 1

My point is that "The BBC brings you all the week's science news" is not intended to be understood and treated as a scientific claim, but as something rathere different. As Wittgenstein (1953/2009) famously pointed out, language has to be understood in specific contexts, and there are different 'language games'. So, in the genre of the scientific report there are particular standards and norms that apply to the claims made. Occasionally these norms are deliberately broken – perhaps a claim is made that is supported by fabricated evidence, or for which there is no supporting evidence – but this would be judged as malpractice, academic misconduct or at least incompetence. It is not within the rules of that game

However, the BBC's claim is part of a different 'language game' – no one is going to be accused of professional misconduct because, objectively, Science in Action does not brings a listener all the week's science news. The statement is not intended to be understood as an objective knowledge claim, but more a kind of motto or slogan; it is not to be considered 'false' because it not objectively correct. Rather, it is to be understood in a fuzzy, vague, impressionistic way.

To ask whether "The BBC brings you all the week's science news" through Science in Action is a true or false claim would be a kind of category error. The same kind of category error that occurs if we ask whether or not a scientist believes in the ideal gas law, the periodic table or models of climate change.

Who invented gravity?

This then raises the question of how we understand what professional academic scientists say on a science news programme that is part of the broadcast media in conversation with professional journalists. Are they, as scientists, engaged in 'science speak', or are they as guests on a news show engaged in 'media speak'?

What provoked this thought with was comments by Dr Fredi Otto who appeared on the programme "to discuss the 2021 Nobel Prizes for Science". In particular, I was struck by two specific comments. The second was:

"…you can't believe in climate change or not, that would just be, you believe in gravity, or not…"

Dr Friederike Otto speaking on Science in Action

Which I took to mean that gravity is so much part of our everyday experience that it is taken-for-granted, and it would be bizarre to have a debate on whether it exists. There are phenomena we all experience all the time that we explain in terms of gravity, and although there may be scope for debate about gravity's nature or its mode of action or even its universality, there is little sense in denying gravity. 2

Newton's notion of gravity predominated for a couple of centuries, but when Einstein proposed a completely different understanding, this did not in any sense undermine the common ('life-world' 2) experience labelled as gravity – what happens when we trip over, or drop something, or the tiring experience of climbing too many steps. And, of course, the common misconception that Newton somehow 'discovered' gravity is completely ahistorical as people had been dropping things and tripping over and noticing that fruit falls from trees for a very long time before Newton posited that the moon was in freefall around the earth in a way analogous to a falling apple!

Believing in gravity

Even if, in scientific terms, believing in a Newtonian conceptualisation of gravity as a force acting at a distance would be to believe something that was no longer considered the best scientific account (in a sense the 'force' of gravity becomes a kind of epiphenomenon in a relativistic account of gravity); in everyday day terms, believing in the phenomenon of gravity (as a way of describing a common pattern in experience of being in the world) is just plain common sense.

Dr Otto seemed to be suggesting that just as gravity is a phenomenon that we all take for granted (regardless of how it is operationalised or explained scientifically), so should climate change be. That might be something of a stretch as the phenomena we associate with gravity (e.g., dense objects falling when dropped, ending up on the floor when we fall) are more uniform than those associated with climate change – which is of course why one tends to come across more climate change deniers than gravity deniers. To the best of my knowledge, not even Donald Trump has claimed there is no gravity.

But the first comment that gave me pause for thought was:

"…we now can attribute, with absolute certainty, the increase in global mean temperature to the increase in greenhouse gases because our burning of fossil fuels…"

Dr Friederike Otto speaking on Science in Action
Dr Fredi Otto has a profile page at the The Environmental Change Unit,
University of Oxford

Absolute certainty?

That did not seem to me like a scientific statement – more like the kind of commitment associated with belief in a religious doctrine. Science produces conjectural, theoretical knowledge, but not absolute knowledge?

Surely, absolute certainty is limited to deductive logic, where proofs are possible (as in mathematics, where conclusions can be shown to inevitably follow from statements taken as axioms – as long as one accepts the axioms, then the conclusions must follow). Science deals with evidence, but not proof, and is always open to being revisited in the light of new evidence or new ways of thinking about things.

Read about the nature of scientific knowledge

Science is not about belief

For example, at one time many scientists would have said that the presence of an ether 3 was beyond question (as for example waves of light travelled from the sun to earth, and waves motion requires a medium). Its scientific characterisation -e.g., the precise nature of the ether, its motion relative to the earth – were open to investigation, but its existence seemed pretty secure.

It seemed inconceivable to many that the ether might not exist. We might say it was beyond reasonable doubt. 4 But now the ether has gone the way of caloric and phlogiston and N-rays and cold fusion and the four humours… It may have once been beyond reasonable doubt to some (given the state of the evidence and the available theoretical perspectives), but it can never have been 'absolutely certain'.

To suggest something is certain may open us to look foolish later: as when Wittgenstein himself suggested that we could be certain that "our whole system of physics forbids us to believe" that people could go to the moon.

Science is the best!

Science is the most reliable and trustworthy approach to understanding the natural world, but a large part of that strength comes from it never completely closing a case for good – from never suggesting to have provided absolute certainty. Science can be self-correcting because no scientific idea is 'beyond question'. That is not to say that we abandon, say, conversation of energy at the suggestion of the first eccentric thinker with designs for a perpetual motion machine – but in principle even the principle of conservation of energy should not be considered as absolutely certain. That would be religious faith, not scientific judgement.

So, we should not believe. It should not be considered absolutely certain that "the increase in global mean temperature [is due to] the increase in greenhouse gases because [of] our burning of fossil fuels", as that suggests we should believe it as a doctrine or dogma, rather than believe that the case is strong enough to make acting accordingly sensible. That is, if science is always provisional, technically open to review, then we can never wait for absolute certainty before we act, especially when something seems beyond reasonable doubt.

You should not believe scientific ideas

The point is that certainty and belief are not really the right concepts in science, and we should avoid them in teaching science:

"In brief, the argument to be made is that science education should aim for understanding of scientific ideas, but not for belief in those ideas. To be clear, the argument is not just that science education should not intend to bring about belief in scientific ideas, but rather that good science teaching discourages belief in the scientific ideas being taught."

Taber, 2017: 82

To be clear – to say that we do not want learners to believe in scientific ideas is NOT to say we want them to disbelieve them! Rather, belief/disbelief should be orthogonal to the focus on understanding ideas and their evidence base.

I suggested above that to ask whether "The BBC brings you all the week's science news" through Science in Action is a true or false claim would be a kind of category error. I would suggest it is a category error in the same sense as asking whether or not people should believe in the ideal gas law, the periodic table, or models of climate change.

"If science is not about belief, then having learners come out of science lessons believing in evolution, or for that matter believing that magnetic field lines are more concentrated near the poles of a magnet, or believing that energy is always conserved, or believing that acidic solutions contain solvated hydrogen ions,[5] misses the point. Science education should help students understand scientific ideas, and appreciate why these ideas are found useful, and something of their status (for example when they have a limited range of application). Once students can understand the scientific ideas then they become available as possible ways of thinking about the world, and perhaps as notions under current consideration as useful (but not final) accounts of how the world is."

Taber, 2017: 90

But how do scientists cross the borders from science to science communication?

Of course many scientists who have studied the topic are very convinced that climate change is occurring and that anthropogenic inputs into the atmosphere are a major or the major cause. In an everyday sense, they believe this (and as they have persuaded me, so do I). But in a strictly logical sense they cannot be absolutely certain. And they can never be absolutely certain. And therefore we need to act now, and not wait for certainty.

I do not know if Dr Otto would refer to 'absolute certainty' in a scientific context such as a research paper of a conference presentation. But a radio programme for a general audience – all ages, all levels of technical background, all degrees of sophistication in appreciating the nature of science – is not a professional scientific context, so perhaps a different language game applies. Perhaps scientists have to translate their message into a different kind of discourse to get their ideas across to the wider public?

The double bind

My reaction to Dr Otto's comments derived from a concern with public understanding of the nature of science. Too often learners think scientific models and theories are meant to be realistic absolute descriptions of nature. Too often they think science readily refutes false ideas and proves the true ones. Scientists talking in public about belief and absolute certainty can reinforce these misconceptions.

On the other hand, there is probably nothing more important that science can achieve today than persuade people to act to limit climate change before we might bring about shifts that are (for humanity if not for the planet) devastating. If most people think that science is about producing absolute certain knowledge, then any suggestion that there is uncertainty over whether human activity is causing climate change is likely to offer the deniers grist, and encourage a dangerous 'well let's wait till we know for sure' posture. Even when it is too late and the damage has been done, if there are any scientists left alive, they still will not know absolutely certainly what caused the changes.

"…Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
In any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive…"

(Peter Gabriel performing on the Kate Bush TV special, 1979: BBC Birmingham)

So, perhaps climate scientists are in a double bind – they can represent the nature of science authentically, and have their scientific claims misunderstood; or they can do what they can to get across the critical significance of their science, but in doing so reinforce misconceptions of the nature of scientific knowledge.

Coda

I started drafting this yesterday: Thursday. By coincidence, this morning, I heard an excellent example of how a heavyweight broadcast journalist tried to downplay a scientific claim because it was couched as not being absolutely certain!

Works cited:

Notes

1 An alternative almost tautological interpretation might be that the BBC decides what is 'science news', and it is what is included in Science in Action, might fit some critics complaints that the BBC can be a very arrogant and self-important organisation – if only because there are stories not covered in Science in Action that do get covered in the BBC's other programmes such as BBC Inside Science.

2 This might be seen as equivalent to saying that the life-world claim that gravity (as is commonly understood and experienced) exists is taken-for-granted Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). A scientific claim would be different as gravity would need to be operationally defined in terms that were considered objective, rather that just assuming that everyone in the same language community shares a meaning for 'gravity'.

3 The 'luminiferous' aether or ether. The ether was the name given to the fifth element in the classical system where sublunary matter was composed of four elements (earth, water, air, fire) and the perfect heavens from a fifth.

(Film  director Luc Besson's sci-fi/fantasy movie 'The Fifth Element' {1997, Gaumont Film Company} borrows from this idea very loosely: Milla Jovovich was cast in the title role as a perfect being who is brought to earth to be reunited with the other four elements in order to save the world.)

4 Arguably the difference between forming an opinion on which to base everyday action (everyday as in whether to wear a rain coat, or to have marmalade on breakfast toast, not as in whether to close down the global fossil fuel industry), and proposing formal research conclusions can be compared to the difference between civil legal proceedings (decided on the balance of probabilities – what seems most likely given the available evidence) and criminal proceedings – where a conviction is supposed to depend upon guilt being judged beyond reasonable doubt given the available evidence (Taber, 2013).

Read about writing-up research

5 Whether acids do contain hydrated hydrogen ions may seem something that can reasonably be determined, at least beyond reasonable doubt, by empirical investigation. But actually not, as what counts as an acid has changed over time as chemists have redefined the concept according to what seemed most useful. (Taber, 2019, Chapter 6: Conceptualising acids: Reimagining a class of substances).

The Arts in Our Hearts and the Creativity in our Science

Keith S. Taber

A(nother) point of view?

Bernardine Evaristo argues for a broad curriculum

On Sunday morning I heard Bernardine Evaristo reading her essay 'The Arts in Our Hearts' in BBC Radio 4's weekly 'A Point of View' slot. It was a heartfelt and compelling argument for the importance of investing in the arts in education (and well worth a listen).

Demoting creativity?

Evaristo complained about the lack of support for the arts in the current curriculum context.

"We have an educational provision that demotes and demeans creativity in the hierarchy of subjects"

Since the introduction of the Natural Curriculum in England, science, mathematics and English have had a specials status, and in recent years the arts have been squeezed – often treated as luxuries and foci for extra-curricular provision. Among the points Evaristo made were that it was inappropriate to pressure all children towards STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects "because [it is suggested] that's where the future lies", as education is not just about preparing for work, and (even if it were) degrees in the arts and humanities can perfectly well lead to good careers; and also arts education supports the development of creativity – "the very creativity that might one day lead them to a career in science or engineering".

I found much to agree with here.

A (personal) science bias

I was fascinated with science as a child. When I entered secondary school I was asked what I wanted to do when I left. I said I wanted to go to University to do science. (All my subsequent careers input took the form of the single annual leading question:  "Do you still want to go to University to study science?") I did a chemistry degree. I trained to teach chemistry and physics. I became a science teacher, then a science lecturer, and then a science education lecturer. I was never any good at art, failed to learn to play an instrument well, cannot dance (even my swimming is a potential danger to others, and – when I am in the lane closest to the pool wall- to my own fingers)…there was no way I was going to become an artist. So, I might be considered to have a science bias.

Why educate?

But I totally agree with the gist of what Evaristo argued. Education is not about preparing people for jobs, and it should not be primarily about helping them acquire skills for the jobs market. That cannot be totally ignored, but that sounds more like training than education. Education has multiple purposes and these need to be reflected in curriculum (Taber, 2019). Certainly we want education to allow young people to have the chance to progress to achieve their goals – which may be to become a heart surgeon, a cosmologist, or a marine biologist. Or, it may be to be a journalist, novelist, choreographer, songwriter, historian, film critic…

But education is about developing the whole person, and that will not happen when the curriculum is too narrow. Education is also about inducting learners into the culture of their society (and increasingly the 'global village' moves towards being one suprasociety). Children should be supported in engaging with a wide range of different areas, even if they decide they do not wish to later follow-up some or most of these.

And this does not just mean following-up for for employment: a person who becomes a sculptor should have their life outside the studio enhanced due to what they experienced in school science, just as someone who becomes a pharmacist should have their life outside the dispensary enhanced due to what they experienced in arts classes; and someone who becomes an office cleaner or who works in a customer service call centre has the right to have their life enhanced by the range of school experiences across the curriculum.

Culture and civil-isation

I value having gone to the theatre from school, and on a trip to hear a symphony orchestra. I never went to ballet or opera, but I would want all children to be offered these experiences. Children should not leave school without some art history – not highly theoretical, but having had a chance to become familiar with different styles of painting. And so with other areas of our common inheritance – and not limited to what might be called 'high culture'. (Consider the popularity on mainstream television channels of programmes about ballroom dancing, cooking, gardening, antiques collecting, landscape and portrait painting, interior design/decoration, making/renovating/recycling, and so forth.)

This is what it means to be civilised.

Without experiencing different aspects of culture, at least having a taster of what is out there, children are not being fully inducted into that culture. Where schools do not offer this, we have a two-tier society – where some children are able to access the breadth of culture because of home background, and others (perhaps partly because socio-economic conditions do not allow, but perhaps partly simply because the parents were themselves never offered glimpses of these options in their own education) miss out. Bernstein's notion of 'restricted code' can be understood in a wider sense than just access to forms of language.

It is not acceptable that a broad education offering access to informed choices about later engagement in the wider culture is offered to those who can afford private education or extra-curricular enrichment activities, but the rest have to settle for, hopefully, being employable.

'To live without my music, would be (near) impossible to do…'

I was never going to be an artist, but works of art have given me much pleasure. Arguably music has been as important to me as science – the constant companion since my adolescence (I feel a John Miles lyric seeking to make itself felt here). I cannot sing well, play an instrument, or even whistle in tune. I cannot tell the key a piece is in. I have somewhat eclectic tastes, and indeed some might indeed suggest little taste at all – but 'I know what I like (in your wardrobe)' and what has uplifted me, puzzled me, excited me, consoled me, calmed me, comforted me – what music can do to transcend the moment and shift the mood – surely that's what really matters?

So I'm there 100% – an education that prioritises the sciences over the humanities, and, even more so, over the arts, is as distorted as the curriculum of the original grammar schools which would not have known what to with with natural philosophy (proto-science), and found the idea of adding Greek to the curriculum something of a progressive innovation. Of course, that is an ahistorical judgement (ignoring the context at the time), whereas today there is no excuse for this kind of short-sightedness.

But I do have just a couple of reservations about Evaristo's essay, or more to the point, what could be taken away from it.

We need to encourage all young people to see STEM options as open, and welcoming, to them

My first slight reservation is that although I agree that we should not pressure all children towards science and other STEM areas, we should bear in mind that some groups have historically been underrepresented in science subjects, and some children may have been given the impression that science is not for the likes of them. We need to do all we can to make science inclusive – science (as with art) is a core part of all our culture, and a universal human activity. We should not push everyone into science, but we need to make it clear that no one is excluded because of gender or ethnicity or religious faith or other kinds of (claimed or perceived) group identity. So, science teachers should encourage everyone to believe that science could be for them, but working on a level playing field with other teachers promoting their own areas.

Science IS creative

My second, slight, query is the identification of creativity with arts education. That is not to say that arts education does not offer opportunities for creativity –  of course it does – but rather the potential inference that science education can not.

Evaristo recognises that creativity is important to the professional in STEM fields, so surely science education needs to develop this. Science has a rightly deserved reputation for logic, reasoning, and rational thought – but this can only work on the creative ideas that scientists develop: without the imaginative invention of novel ideas to test, there would be no experiments or data to do any logical analysis with ( Taber, 2011).

So when Bernardine Evaristo refers to "play, a.k.a the arts" she neglects the role of play in science. When this play takes place in the lab', it needs to be play subject to a careful risk assessment, certainly, but it is still a form of play. A period of familiarisation with a phenomenon is often essential background for developing an investigative strategy.

Creativity is part of an authentic science education

That is not to say I am claiming that this creativity is always obvious in science education. Over-packed curriculum specifications that make science courses seem like an endless barrage of unconnected topics, and mark schemes designed as if for automatons examining work produced by automatons having been instructed by automatons, seem designed to squeeze out any opportunities for teaching and learning that can offer an authentic feel for what science is actually like. All work, no play, makes Jacqueline a dull scientist, and so unlikely to discover anything substantially new. So yes, perhaps "We have an educational provision that demotes and demeans creativity in the hierarchy of subjects" through, first, locating STEM subjects at the pinnacle, but, then, also by misrepresenting them as not being creative.

Of course, there are enrichment activities that allow learners to be creative in science activities, and to engage with projects or topics over extended periods of time – and so give more of an authentic feel for scientific enquiry. The CREST awards scheme from 'the British Ass' (The British Science Association) is just one example (Taber & Cole, 2010). But then, like extra-curricular arts, this is not available in all schools, and, moreover, students should not need to go outside the curriculum to get authentic and creative science education.

Curriculum breadth is not a luxury

So, yes, I totally agree that:

"it's vital for the country's future that we reject, once and for all, the notion that the arts are a luxury"

But I would also argue that it is vital for humanity's future that we reject, once and for all, the notion that science is only about logic, and that only the arts offer creativity.

Everyone should be introduced in their schooling to all the key aspects of our culture. And just as art education has to involve creating, not only being taught art history or appreciation, science education has to offer a feel for science as a practice, not just a never-ending parade of theories, models, laws, and so forth, previously created by someone else (and most often a dead, 'white', male someone). Creativity in science is clearly different in its expression to creativity in the arts – and so both should be experienced in everyone's schooling.

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