Ray Bradbury said, ""

That's Bullshit

Ernst Mach, the founder of modern axiomatic mechanics now known only for his epynomous speed limit, defined science as the economy of thought. Science was that process by which humans were able to accomplish more with less thinking, less getting their hands dirty with experience, and scarcely any thousand-year intervals of repeated stupidity.

Science accomplishes this economy of thought in two ways: filtering out the nonessential, and using hierarchical levels of explanation.

In an example stolen from Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted Darkness, imagine the indigenous use of willow-grass as an analgesic. For thousands of years, a wizened old man would paint himself, have a fire lit, brew a potion consisting of dried willow-grass leaves and dung and anything else laying around, and have a sufferer drink it while running clockwise around the fire while being scourged with branches. Miraculously, the sufferer's headache would disappear. Magic!

Consider, now, how much information each medicine man had to learn. He had to be patiently taught the various herbs to select, the proper type of dung to use, the spirit signs in the clouds that determine propitious days for healing, the words of an elaborate supplication to the gods, the minerals to extract for pigment to be used on his face, and myriads other bits of information just to be a general practictioner medicine man. After years of apprenticeship, he was ready to help the sufferings of his tribe members.

What happened if the headache remained? The medine man would have to analyse each element of the ritual for error. Perhaps he put his left foot in when he should have taken it out and shaken it all about. Perhaps he had said a prayer wrong and angered the gods. Any number of components could have failed, and he would be hard-pressed (luckily for his reputation) to identify which.

Science begins with laziness. The medicine man has another appointment; he skips a prayer and the man still feels better. He runs out of a herb or two, and the man still gets better. He lets his apprentice do the ritual, the apprentice screws every other word up, doesn't even hit the sufferer the right number of times as he runs about the fire; the man still gets better. This is almost science. All it lacks is the active application of laziness.

Someone wonders, how little of the ritual is actually necessary? Could I use a pared-down version myself at home and spare the expense of an appointment? Laziness practically compells the person to spend a lot of hard work reducing the ritual to its bare essentials. This lazy observer decimates the ritual, removing not only the half-hour prayers but even the funky drum solo in the middle. He scraps the face paint, the cloud patterns, and wonders why he should bother running around so much. Eventually he discovers that all that is necessary is the potion. With a little more laziness, he discovers he only needs to find one ingredient, the willow-grass, and can skip over the ground eagle-egg powder and buffalo testicle. This is science. A lot of hard work reduced years of education as a medicine man and an elaborate ritual, to perhaps a single sentence such as "find so and so herb, grind it up, and drink it as a tea to feel better." The sexy way of saying this, is that the algorithmic complexity of achieving this goal has been reduced by orders of magnitude.

And so science advances. All it takes, initially, is a particularly lazy or impatient observer; he doesn't even have to be much more lazy than his fellows. Rapidly we discover the world is simpler than we thought. When objects fall, their relative weights don't matter, only their relative air-resistance. Eclipses occur at regular intervals and don't give a damn about wars or rulers. Kill rats and remove the dead to end a plague, no need for sacrificing virgins to appease the gods. Wait out storms and droughts, they'll end even if you don't begin the usual "rip out hearts to funky chanting" ritual. As more bullshit is weeded out, the process accelerates as laziness pays off more and more. Exactly how little effort is required to heal, build a tool, irrigate a farm, or predict an eclipse?

Thus the application of laziness to our world simplifies things. Whole swathes of explanations that once required years of experience or education, now are reduced to a few statements. There is only one problem: the world is big. Even with a huge amount of bullshit ignored, there is still alot of things to take into account.

This is where the second element of science comes in. It is possible, of this reduced set of statements necessary to understand our world, to still treat most of them as irrelevant for any specific purpose. Why bother understanding how this lens works, when you're really only interested in what you're seeing through it? Who cares what new-fangled ideas explain the elements, when you're only interested in finding out why this dye helps a fever? The same laziness and impatience that led to a drastic simplification of the picture of the world, also leads the lazy man to state, "that's someone else's problem." If he wants to know how something works in more detail, he can easily find someone interested in that problem. One man discovers that willow-grass is the only important thing in the ritual, another man discovers that salicylic acid is the only important part of the willow-grass, and another man discovers that chemistry has at least one use when his wild-haired chemist friend explains to him how he can make salicylic acid without foraging.

Over time, willy nilly, this process becomes a culturally inherited mindset. A scientist is someone who, for some reason, views most of the world as irrelevant to whatever he is looking at. The engineer takes this to an extreme, and views even the scientist's explanation as mostly unnecessary bullshit. Over thousands of years we discover that lodestones are not gods and that sparks are easy to make; James Clerk Maxwell discovers that only a page of statements can explain all of this interesting behavior; and an electrical engineering major discovers he can discard all of that for two or three equations small enough to write on a stick of gum the night before an exam.

This way of viewing the world is contagious, not the least reason for which is the proven addictiveness of showing that our teachers did more work than they really had to. Laziness compells people to spend decades of their lives proving that an explanation only requires the study of a few pages, and then compells students to spend nights without sleep to prove that even sleep-deprived automatons can do the exact same task that once required a lifetime of study and a rich patron, as long as they have enough coffee in their system.

In a way, the whole history of science is a reduction of the world to terms that are so simple even a liberal arts student can pretend to understand after having read an article about them in National Geographic or Scientific American.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 19, 2008 04:21 EST | Permalink | comments |
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