The Fable of the Cannoneer and the Observer

The Fable

A cannoneer sets up his cannon on a high plateau and starts firing cannonballs into the valley below him. His cannonballs are all alike but for every shot he varies the elevation of the cannon and the charge-the charge affects the velocity of the cannonball as it leaves the cannon-according to a pattern set in advance.

Science would say that an observer in the valley who would observe where the cannonballs hit the ground and how fast they are travelling would be able to deduce the elevation and charge used by the cannoneer, thus deducing the pattern used to vary them and subsequently predicting where the next cannonball would fall.

In practice an observer placed in the bottom of the valley measuring the velocity of the cannonballs would discover that they all hit the ground at the same velocity! All cannonballs would be moving at their terminal velocity, because air friction would reduce the velocity if it is higher and gravity would increase it if it were lower than terminal velocity.

Scale Appreciation in Modern Science

The worst thing that happened to science in the last fifty years is the invention of the super-computer, while the great computational power of these machines made it possible to solve some problems using the latest scientific theory it has also been a barrier to the development of newer and more efficient theories.

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.