In the last article, we encountered the ‘human element’ in
science. Let us begin our exploration of this in a slightly different fashion…
with a familiar childhood story.
In an ancient kingdom of India lived six blind men, and one
day they decided to go exploring in the forest. Having never ventured far into
the forest before, none of them had encountered an elephant, but now they did,
and luckily for them it was a gentle elephant. Well, the first man just walked
straight into the creature’s massive side, and declared: “It is a wall!” The
second was a bit more cautious, and good thing too, as he encountered its sharp
tusk. Carefully feeling it all over, he was absolutely sure that it was a
spear. The third happened to encounter the swinging trunk, and informed the
others loudly that the elephant was indeed, very much like a snake. The fourth
and the fifth had different ideas… having caught hold of the beast’s leg and
ear, they were convinced that it was a tree, or a fan. Not to be outdone, the
last one went a-groping as well, and yanking on the surprised animal’s tail,
emphatically declared it to be a rope. Of course, what followed was a long
discourse among each of them as to what the elephant really is, and none of
them could see eye to eye (literally).
This (mostly realistic) story illustrates some concepts at
the root of any investigation of the unknown, and in our context of examining
the processes in science, it is very pertinent. Of course, one must keep in
mind that it is an analogy, and we must therefore clearly determine its
boundaries. First of all, it does happen in almost all of the scientific
investigations that the process in question is not directly amenable to
perception, but its qualities have to be inferred from what can be sensed in
one way or another with our instruments. The instruments are generally built as
extensions of sense organs… we cannot here sounds below 20Hz, but we can
definitely make instruments that can sense the same. To start with, we all are
indeed, ‘blind men’ for what is at first encountered.
The next step is -- how do we understand more with what we
have? It is seen that as humans we possess the intellect i.e. when we recognize
something whose effect we perceive indirectly because we lack the necessary
senses, we cannot infer by instruments, but we CAN infer by logic. The
quantitative reach of our sense organs is extended by instruments, and for the
qualitative reach, we have to extend it by means of our logical thinking
process. Indeed, mathematics is just one of those, at least with respect to
magnitudes. This can then be verified by experimentation. So here we notice the
tie-in of three fundamental concepts: the perception of our world, the making
of concepts about the world, and the verification of the concepts.
Let us get back to our blind friends and their logic. It is
clear that each one of them is making an error, but let us see what the nature
of the error is. Firstly, when any one of them approaches the elephant, and
encounters it, the data he receives are seen in the light of what is already
known. He knows about the snake, for instance, and hence extrapolates. Even
if there was only one person investigating, we would still say that his
identification is incorrect; the fact that they observe different things only
makes it worse.
But let us say all the blind men turn up one by one to touch
the elephant’s trunk alone, they would probably ALL agree that it is a snake. Here
the second part of the error gets highlighted, and that is premature judgment.
There would be some ‘minor’ errors in calling a trunk a snake, one of them
might point out, for example, that the trunk feels rougher than snakeskin.
Strict science would not be led to make a pronouncement about an unknown as
soon as it is encountered, but would have to wait until the conclusions are
consistent with ALL the data. It would have to say “Yes, it feels like it is a
snake… but since the skin is rough, and there are two holes… well, it is at
best an approximation, although it is practical”. Blind Man Three does not do
that.
If we further imagine a person who has his sight, being
present in the situation, he would see how big of an approximation it really
is, and would point it out to our friends. But, in a traditional scientific
sense, since the blind men outnumber him, it would take a LONG TIME for them to
realize that he is actually correct, after all their arguments. Scientifically
they are doing the right thing, they have only felt the trunk, all evidence so
far tells them that it is an approximate snake. If a totally different opinion,
(such as:”Hang on, guys, that is not a snake, but a nose, that is shaped like
it!”) turns up, within the scientific area, then naturally none would agree. Here, another error of the traditional
scientific process is seen: if a new idea turns up which bears no similarity to
any of the existing ideas or theories, (whoever heard of a nose like a snake?)
it takes a long time to get accepted because democracy is against it.
The guy with the new idea has to just wait for the numbers to win.
Finally, a fourth error lies in introducing additional
assumptions to combat the “anomalies”. If a particularly bright blind man, say
Number Six, comes up with the idea “Hey wait, what if this is a different kind
of snake? Maybe it is an exception, which has rough skin!” Logical in a way,
but erroneous. And why? Because, in addition to the first two errors, here a
new assumption is made, NOT derived from what is already known, to fit the
facts to what is known. It is more laborious to examine the head and the tail
and the ear before identifying it properly, but the final identification would
be correct. It is a “quick fix” to assume something, but it actually holds up
true scientific progress pretty thoroughly.
To summarize, there are four errors:
- Restriction to what is already known
- Premature descriptions and theorizing
- Invoking the majority to decide what is true
- Allowing additional assumptions
In a word, the underlying concept can be said to be convenience
or “practicality” in common terms. It is easier to assume that the new
perceptions are extensions of old perceptions, it is more useful to have an
approximate model for quick calculations (“it works!”), it is practical to
refer the idea to existing specialists in the field to decide what is correct
and what isn’t, and it is okay to make some assumptions to help us in those
calculations. But in the actual sense of discovering reality, even if one of
the above errors is committed, the whole process is really illogical, and leads
to wrong results. Convenience turns out to be not so convenient, and what’s
more, logically convenience is actually irrelevant.
What is the alternative? It is seen that if the blind man
had painstakingly gone ahead with his explorations, and explored even half the
body of the elephant, he would have sensed the similarity with other animals he
has known, and also the differences. At which point he might even be able to
predict, on finding the front limbs, something about the existence of other two
limbs, and come to the correct conclusion, that this is a whole new animal.
Here, there is no talk of convenience, or of approximations, but ploughing
ahead with the exploration till a consistent picture emerges. As to the
question of which ideas of today are probably erroneous, and which ones are
probably correct, as just described – that will be taken up in the next
article.
