Applied Philosophy

This post is dedicated to those who are still reading and to the dead,
who cannot read anymore.

In Scale Appreciation in Modern Science I wrote the following:

Almost all resources have been put towards developing better computational implementations and bigger computational capacity; while very little has been devoted to developing theories that need less computation.

Now we read in a recent article:

“The models run on these computers can generate visualizations of everything from supernovas to protein structures.But even with the speed supercomputers provide, the complex models are quickly overwhelming current computing capabilities.”

—Mock Supernova Created by Supercomputer [my emphasis]

The real problem is that supercomputers are being overwhelmed by the models, while scientific theory has hardly moved forward for the last two generations. Now that is a scientific crisis.

In the past science advanced by bounds and leaps from one generation to another, sometimes the scientific output of one country declines while that of another increase. Now the whole modern world, with its modern science, is declining without an alternative to take over. There is a real qualitative difference between the so-called scientists of today and real scientists who advanced science in the past.

Newton, who died in 1727, built on the foundation of his predecessors. His three abstract laws became the foundation for scores of empirical laws already discovered by great scientists like Johannes Kepler (died 1630), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) and Christiaan Huygens (d. 1695), to name just a few.

Those men had built their empirical laws on a solid foundation consisting of observations collected by their predecessors, great names like Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543) and Tycho Brahe (d. 1601).

They in turn built on the science developed by the Islamic East and in particular the invention of Algebra, the basis for all subsequent mathematical advances (see the Wikipedia articles: Astronomy in medieval Islam & List of Muslim astronomers).

Newton himself acknowledged this when he wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”. Unfortunately the view of modern science is blocked by huge super-computers.

In The Fable of the Cannoneer and the Observer I wrote the following:

They have spent huge amounts of money on building larger and larger accelerators, the failure of each one to advance the science becomes the reason for building an even bigger one; this process of enlargement has resulted in an accelerator as big as a city, the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end.

And now the recent article:

“The world’s largest scientific machine has cost $10 billion, has worked only nine days and has yet to smash an atom. The unique equipment in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel with cathedral-sized detectors deep beneath the Swiss-French border has been assembled by specialists in many countries, with 8,970 physicists eagerly awaiting the startup.

But despite the expense, thousands of physicists around the world, many of whom hope to conduct experiments here, insist that it will work and that it is crucial to mankind’s understanding of the universe.

…

The collider emerged as the world’s largest after the U.S. canceled the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas in 1993. Congress pulled the plug after costs soared, and questions were raised about the value of the science it could produce.

…

They hope the higher energy will enable them to see particles so far undetected, such as the elusive Higgs boson, which in theory gives mass to other particles — and objects and creatures — in the universe.”

—Particle collider: Black hole or crucial machine? Associated Press [my emphasis]

I can say no more than: “the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end”.