A discussion (On bro science, and how throwing that label on systems that might not be scientifically valid, yet potentially extremely effective, is shortchanging them) just reminded me of this excerpt from A Grand Design (Stephen Hawking): A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. The measures sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside their bowl. For example, due to the distortion, a freely moving object would be observed by the goldfish to move along a curved path. Nevertheless, the goldfish could formulate laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true. Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. The reason I find this so relevant much of the time- anybody observing true reality would say the goldfish is wrong. The goldfishs view is distorted, incorrect. Yet the goldfishs view of the world answers nearly every question the goldfish has, yes? How caught up are we often in pursuit of the real truth, whether it be in science or elsewhere? How often do we discard the voice of experience because we believe that our true scientific knowledge trumps a worldview that may be distorted? How often do we gainsay and ignore our elders/ predecessors because we believe they dont know the truth like we do? Their model served them just fine... and who knows, their observations may be no less correct than our own. ....back to throwing pancakes.
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 22:41:23 +0000
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