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Yet another example where it is tempting to retrofit a modern understanding onto a historical debate. We're tempted to do this because when you're embedded to t

• bee_rider 3y ago
  I wonder if it might be pop-sci vs science, rather than modern vs historical. Physicists (from the outside at least) have always seemed more like hunters than the town watch, they go looking for the problems. There isn’t some catastrophic looming threat of physics approaching that they have to deal with, haha. Unexplainable data is an opportunity and all that.
  • btilly 3y ago
    What I'm talking about is very much modern vs historical. To take a trivial example, most of us would like to draw a straight line from Darwin writing The Origin of the Species to the current acceptance of his theory of evolution. We have no particular desire to follow how Darwin's work inspired Francis Galton to study heredity. Unfortunately Galton discovered regression to the mean when he did. Further experiments undermined Darwin's theories as it uncovered evidence for "natural types". The result was that a half-century after Darwin's great book, many scientists doubted Darwin's theories. But then R. A. Fischer managed to explain the mess with population genetics based on Mendel's theories. "Natural types" disappeared from the literature, and Darwin was back. Today Galton is likely to be remembered as a dilletante who invented the idea of eugenics. And Fischer as a genius in statistics. We retrofit a story with heroes (Darwin and Fischer) and villains (Galton). We skip over the bad parts, and focus on the good. In the process we forget that Darwin also took it for granted that blacks must be inferior to whites. And that Fischer was also a supporter of eugenics. And that Galton set out to confirm Darwin, then accepted the data that he encountered. We want a story, not a mess. But history is full of messes. Arranging the right ideas in the right ways involved a whole lot of trial and error that wasn't obvious at the time. While some of us enjoy learning about the history, it actually isn't very helpful for scientists. Because there is little point in learning every wrong idea that people used to hold, only to immediately learn that you can forget it again because it was wrong. But while that exercise does not help us learn what is currently known, maybe it can help give us more humility about what it is we think we know today?
    • CamperBob2 3y ago
      Because there is little point in learning every wrong idea that people used to hold, only to immediately learn that you can forget it again because it was wrong. Of course there's a point, one you suggest yourself. "If great scientists like Darwin could be wrong about X, is there a chance that I'm wrong about Y?"
      • btilly 3y ago
        That point can be reached with a relatively small amount of history. Nobody could possibly learn all of it.
• csours 3y ago
  One could easily adopt the idea that the history of science is "Some smart guy figured this out" over and over again. The real history of science is: A lot of people became interested in problems and worked on theory and test apparatus and put their ideas into public discussion and eventually and sometimes suddenly we developed narratives and equations that explain observations. Along the way there was a lot of contention and conflict.
  • btilly 3y ago
    It is easy to retrofit many simple stories onto science. In this case the "smart guy who figured it out" usually didn't understand the discovery in the same way that we do today. Something was figured out, but typically not in the modern glory that we explain it with today.
  • leephillips 3y ago
    The equations don’t just congeal out of the air, no matter how many people are thinking about the problems. They are indeed the results of some smart people figuring things out.