This letter is in response to Charles Day’s editorial “Science is special” (Physics Today, July 2016, page 8). Obviously, there is an objective truth regarding the universe that exists external to the human mind. However, all of our scientific theories are products of the human mind and therefore not the same as the real universe. To what extent is the progress of science discovering the truth about the universe, and to what extent are humans simply inventing new theories to match current observation? It is human nature to want to believe that our theories are true, so in the debate over discovering versus inventing, our impulse is to skew in the direction of claiming that we are discovering something that was true before we discovered it.
In his book Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (University of Chicago Press, 1984), Andrew Pickering discusses the flaw in this way of looking at the history of science. Obviously, we discover individual facts that are objectively true, but is our entire view of the universe, based on our current scientific theories, true? Is it even close?
Throughout history, scientists have assumed that their view of the universe was close to being true. Each time, they were proven wrong. It is probably equally wrong to make the same assumption today. We can’t even assume that we are making substantial progress toward knowing the truth about the universe, because we don’t know how far our current theories are from the truth. Our progress to date might be negligible compared with the distance we have yet to go. However, we can measure the extent to which our present theories explain what we can currently examine. We observe natural phenomena, try to fit them into the framework of current theories, and try to think up explanations for them. Making new observations leads to new theories, which leads to technological advancements, which are applied to building new experimental tools, which enable us to observe natural phenomena that we could not detect previously, which means we have to revise our theories. The process continues in a never-ending feedback loop.
Let me pose a question: Can you arrive at the truth by a method other than science? My answer: That depends on what you mean by “science.” We consider Western science to be motivated by natural philosophy going back to the ancient Greeks, which includes a framework of logical reasoning and the scientific method. That approach has been very successful. However, for centuries, the Chinese were able to make scientific progress without that Western tradition, which proves that it is possible, even though their science later stagnated compared with the West’s.
