Recent conferences

Hi all,

I recently spoke at two great conferences, one hosted at my home IHPST at the University of Toronto and the other hosted by the stunning Institut Menorquí d’Estudis in Menorca, Spain.

The first conference was Metaphysics & the Philosophy of Science (you can spy me in some of the pictures) and my talk was about challenges for Ontic Structural Realism in the context of Quantum Field Theory. Specifically, I argued that Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking creates two equally good—but inconsistent— structures that an OSR-ist should believe in. Basically, the point is that OSR (as expressed most by Angelo Cei and Steven French) reifies structure, but that these structures as provided by physics aren’t unique, and therefore aren’t good candidates for singular, fundamental entities.

The next was the 6th European Spring School on History of Science and Popularization, and the theme was “Visual Representations in Science,” in stunning Maó, Menorca. There I got to hang out with people who gave me new perspectives on my Penrose diagram work and listen to a lot of great talks at the interface of History of Science and Art History. The School had pre-circulated papers, and it was a real privilege to have so many in-depth responses to my work. I’m reading one suggested book now, Bender and Marrinan’s The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, 2010).

Thanks to all the participants and organizers!

 

(Plus, I’ll be talking at 4S—joint with HSS and SHOT—in November in Cleveland.)

The decline effect as a philosophical problem pt. 1

In the December 13 edition of the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer writes about a worrisome observation about science: it seems that

all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. [The Truth Wears Off]

He calls it the “decline effect.” The idea is that many early, positive, evidence for some phenomenon are in fact statistical anomalies. As more studies are done, Lehrer observes that the size of many effects—pharmaceutical effectiveness, alleged psychic powers—reduces over time.

At first blush this may be expected. As more studies are done, early results reveal themselves to be statistical fluctuations, and the true value comes out. So the surprise is that results that researchers felt were tested enough, weren’t really. This is the first problem for people who would like to believe in scientific results: (1) we’re not good enough at determining when a result is certain.

This could point to technical problems.

How do you draw a black hole? Upcoming talk at HSS in Montreal

On Friday (November 5) I’ll be presenting some of my work on the history of General Relativity (GR) at the History of Science Society annual meeting in Montreal as part of a panel on Black Holes and Quantum Mechanics (1:30–3:10, Salon B–Level 4). I did my bachelor’s degree at McGill, so I’m really excited to get back to the city, and see some of my old friends and professors.

How to draw a black hole? Errrr...

My talk asks how we can explain the revival of the study of GR that started in the mid-1950s and built strongly into the 1970s.

Shifting the *centrism in natural laws

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of natural laws (along with Greg Lusk), and I’ve been tripping over the metaphysics. I was trained as an undergraduate in both history and physics, so my default stance is some sort of empiricism. The main empiricist understanding of laws of nature is that they are observed regularities in the world. Kepler’s laws are laws because of the reliable behaviour of the planets. This gives us a nice, spare metaphysics (à la Hume): we don’t have to invent some new class of things to explain laws, they are just there is the world as collections of data. This quickly runs into a problem, of course, because we don’t want to say that all regularities are laws. It may be true that all the buildings on my street are made of brick, but that doesn’t make it a law of nature that that’s true. It is an accidental regularity; a regularity that just happens to be true. If someone put up a wooden-framed house, no law would be broken.

So the task of the regularity-theorist is to try and identify what has to be added to the notion of regularity that will allow us to separate laws of nature from accidental generalizations. This has led some regularity-theorists to argue that one thing that separates laws from accidental generalizations is their use by scientists (see e.g. Dretske 1977). That is, what counts as a law is contingent.

This contingency is not a happy position for those philosophers who want laws to be somehow objective,

Theophysics?

3 Quarks Daily pointed me to a recent (9 Sept.) article by Marc Vernon (“a journalist, writer, and former Anglican priest”) titled “The Mirror of the Cosmos: Is cosmology a form of theology for a secular age?” He wonders how we can explain the popularity of cosmological books, like those of Paul Davies and Stephen Hawking.

So here’s a possibility. Cosmology is so popular, not just because of the science, but because it allows us to ask the big questions — where we come from, who we are, where we’re going. It’s metaphysics by other means.

He thinks “the most obvious example of “theophysics” concerns the so-called God particle,” the Higgs boson. Pausing here for a moment, this is clearly off-base. Yes, Nobel Laureate and ex-Fermilab director Leon Lederman christened the Higgs boson as the “God” particle in 1993. (CERN has a short writeup here; an authoritative technical summary of Higgs searches from the PDG in pdf is here.)

But the searching for the Higgs is not theology. It is searching for a particle our best current theories predict; this strategy has worked well in the past (see Alvarez on “bump hunting”). If one was looking for something to call “theophysics,” I would point you toward “Physical Eschatology” the “nascent discipline” of physicists theorizing about what the end of the universe (and after) will be like. (Better phrased: theorizing about what “end of the universe” could mean, see Dyson, 1979.)

Heading back to Veron’s piece, two things struck me. The first was that he puts cosmological “speculation” on the same plane as Scholastic “speculation” about the number of angels you can fit on the end of a pin. Whether or not Scholastics actually ever argued about that, Vernon must know the reference is pejorative. But, I was never under the impression that religion was about speculating at all. Depending on your religious orientation, religion seems to be about practice and belief. Whatever your thoughts on Hawking’s latest, people aren’t running out to become cosmologists, and believing what Hawking tells you is rather different from believing in (a) god. This is a sad brush with which to paint religion or cosmology.

So Vernon missed the mark in his physical and religious examples. What about his claim, above, that cosmology’s popularity is about asking and answering the big questions? This sounds on the right track. Many many scientists describe their motivations to become scientists as rooted in wonder at the origins of things, or a grand design. But why is this connected to religion?

Vernon’s questions are entirely anthropocentric: “where we come from, who we are, where we’re going.” And herein lies the problem. When applied to Cosmology, Vernon’s questions assume that we are part of the answer. There is an idea in Cosmology called the Anthropic Principle. Basically, the idea is that humanity’s existence can be used in physical arguments about the creation and evolution of the universe. The Templeton Foundation, at least, thought there was a strong enough connection to religion to award John Barrow their prize in 2006 (for work like this). But this is a controversial issue (see the Smolin-Susskind discussion here), and these minutiae can’t explain the broad public appeal of cosmology. I think Vernon’s questions are unnecessarily anthropocentric. I want to know about the universe, not about whether I am so important as to have somehow caused it to be the way it is. It was Vernon’s poor questions that led him to religion, not cosmology.

Cosmology’s appeal might be due to the lure of big questions, but these questions are bigger than we are.

Visual Representation in Science Workshop

Here’s the poster for the workshop I’m organizing in December (pdf here: vrs_pdf). The illustrations are (top) a Penrose diagram of the twin universes described by the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein’s Equations in General Relativity; and, (bottom) an embedding diagram by John A. Wheeler illustrating the idea that electric lines of force don’t have to end at a (charged) point if spacetime is multiply connected, i.e. if every electron is a tiny wormhole.

The pitch is:

Scientific practice 2: Latour’s Paseurization

In my last post about scientific practice I wrote that when we read historians of scientific practice we should keep the natural language sense of the phrase in mind. From the OED, I parsed scientific practice to mean “an action that is based on or regulated by science; this action is exercising a profession or the application of an idea, belief, or method.” In this post I apply this understanding to one of the most controversial histories of science from the 1980s, Bruno Latour’s Pasteurization of France. My analysis argues that the most common criticism of Pasteurization is misplaced. The issue is not that Latour does not address scientific practice, but that his conception of scientific practice is inconsistent with his fuller picture of science in action.

Friends at Ether Wave Propaganda

Thanks Will!

(And more Hist of Sci. Practice to come shortly.)

HoS blogging survey

If you’re reading this, please click on Jai Virdi‘s Blogging survey for the HSS newsletter:

http://jaivirdi.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/navigating-the-history-of-science-blogosphere/

What is scientific practice?

Since the 1970s, post-Kuhnian history and philosophy of science has become increasingly concerned with scientific practice. Historians began to look beyond the published sources that underlay the work of Kuhn and Koyré. In part, this was due to the influence of changes in other disciplines. Feminist scholars aligned with the influence of the “new” social history in the desire to capture the history of the marginalized. But those marginalized by science—native populations, women, study subjects, animals—do not have robust lives in scientific publications, if they are mentioned at all. The archival records and material traces of science was needed to tell these stories. Michel Foucault’s  Discipline and Punish connected everyday practice to l’histoire de des mentalités (1977). This all fit well with the development of “microhistory,” extending the influence of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980; first published in Italian in 1976) and Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” ethnography  The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz brings us to the influence of anthropology on HPS, but I will not recount the intellectual history of Edinburgh’s Strong Programme (Barnes, Bloor, Shapin) and the Bath School (Collins, Pinch, Yearly) (See Zammito, 2004; Ashmore, 1989) By the 1980s ‘French’ studies of science lead by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour challenged the Anglophone interpretation of ethnography of science. (It is not really a ‘French’ school, of course. Though Latour is Actor-Network Theory’s public face, he was deeply involved in collaborations with two British sociologists: John Law and Steve Woolgar. The debate plays out in Pickering, 1992.) Neither group accepted the positivistic idea that Nature speaks the Truth to great scientific men. The British sociologists moved the agency in scientific investigation on to the scientists and promulgated various versions of social constructivism. The `French’ analysts preferred to investigate how and why a line is drawn between the actions of scientists and the actions of nature; and they therefore ascribed agency to both people and things (together “actants”). The most important question about scientific practice was Who does the practicing?

I contend that…