In marked contrast to yesterday, I now find myself – still in Agra – listening to a group of scientists having a debate about String Theory. In some ways this is the opposite of the Taj Mahal. Where that is tangible and real and human scale, String Theory is a product of pure thought alone. Even the physicists who study it don’t have any confidence that it really does describe how to unify our theories of the universe.
But it is beautiful, and intricate, and lovely to explore. Perhaps this is the goal of all of our human architectures, whether made of marble or of mathematics.
“Even the physicists who study it don’t have any confidence that it really does describe how to unify our theories of the universe.”
Well of course not – isn’t modern physics unfalsifiable without a cerntified Black Hole Generator(tm)?
Doesn’t mean it isn’t “beautiful, and intricate, and lovely to explore,”…but is, perhaps, closer to art than science (which jives well with what you were trying to say, I guess).
@LastSilmaril
I would love to hear your definitions for science and art.
Science, natural science, applied science – art.
If I would follow your thoughts here, philosophy would be an art too, right?
But please hold on for a minute and think of formal logic or the philosophy of technology, is it art or science to you?
Is mechanical engineering science to you, because you can built something touchable? Or you can use it in production?
So what is it, if an engineer tries to understand the behaviour of non-linear dynamic systems? Is it art or science to you?
I would be happy to call science an art in general, if I think about science as the art of thought.
I am with Ken here, I believe that to explore is the goal of all human architectures, this looking for the truth and there is an endless beauty in it.
ConCERNing my friends at CERN, they do important and often ground-breaking work and help us to understand this world a little better. 🙂
To me reading and trying to understand String-Theory and Quantum-Theory itself helps me to come up with new ideas and new understanding, trying to transfer the things I learnt into my life.
If I want to understand communication, I go back and learn about the Quantum-Theory of information.
Beautiful stuff….all of it and I wish I would be scientist and could spend more time with it.
All I’m saying is, if you cannot test the validity of some statement, if you cannot falsify some hypothesis – well then, that statement is unscientific.
“So what is it, if an engineer tries to understand the behaviour of non-linear dynamic systems? Is it art or science to you?”
I have absolutely no idea what that is. But if you cannot test some idea, and all you can do is invent mathematics that says it is correct – well, aren’t you’re floating around in wonderland a bit? If you say, well, this is my idea, x should happen only after y happens for at least z amount of time, and there’s no way to tell whether x happened or not – well, wasn’t this just a bunch of talk?
But I am no physicist/scientist/inventor/what have you, and am a long way from becoming one still. I haven’t even got past the first section of the first chapter of “What Is Mathematics?”. But I have read Popper about this…I didn’t think anything I was saying was controversial. Then again, it wasn’t taught that way.
(Popper was one of the first things I read once getting in to college, as part of a course called “scientific thinking and speculation”. Really neat stuff, like why giant humans are impossible, what killed the dinosaurs, etc. I’m pretty sure I never formally encountered Ockham’s Razor before then either. It was taught by Steve Soter, who was the first really awesome dude I met here…http://research.amnh.org/users/soter/)
aight, back to work…