Speaking exclusively of observational and experimental sciences, it is obvious that progress can be accomplished only at the cost of destroying or modifying current theories; for if a theory suffices to explain facts discovered after its promulgation, knowledge may be increased; but there is no true progress unless our general outlook is altered.
Alfred Walter Stewart aka J. J. Connington (1880-1947)
Alfred Walter Stewart was a successful academic chemist who also found the time to write four chemistry textbooks plus a series of detective novels, a few other novels and some short stories under the pseudonym J.J. Connington.
I don’t know much about old Alfred, but he comes across as a dry old stick and maybe something of a misogynist. It’s an interesting quote though - there is no true progress unless our general outlook is altered. Yet as we know, progress has come to include certain supposedly science-based political doctrines which must not be altered. The climate change narrative being one of the most obvious.
Suppose we apply Stewart’s quote to the political reality of the climate narrative. It would run something like this - there is no true progress unless our general outlook is unaltered. A sarcastic way of putting it I know, and the faithful would never put like that. Yet floods, droughts, hot, cold, snow, rain, drizzle, grey skies or blue skies all are supposedly consistent with climate doom - scientifically consistent. Genuine progress in orthodox climate science has not been possible for decades because its general outlook has to remain unaltered.
It’s the bureaucratic way – we see it in action every time our UK government and its acolytes push the Net Zero narrative. It doesn’t matter if it is not possible for the UK to make even a theoretical difference to global temperatures. Once Net Zero had been settled at government level it ossified. From that point it has not been possible to make genuine progress in UK energy research and development because our general outlook must remain unaltered.
Yet as Stewart pointed out many decades ago, it is characteristic of genuine progress that our general outlook in the observational and experimental sciences should be altered. If it isn’t altered, then the progress we have supposedly made is fake.
We could take this further. When a political establishment recruits any profession to its ranks, then progress within that profession is curtailed or even halted altogether. Journalism could be a topical example.
4 comments:
"floods, droughts, hot, cold, snow, rain, drizzle, grey skies or blue skies all are supposedly consistent with climate doom"
Yup, heads they win, tails you lose.
Mark - it's so obviously crooked and impossible to miss, but people do.
There are probably two types of "progress" that we need to be aware of. One is when a theory delivers more of the goods, when the same idea or framework explains more and more of what is brought to it. The second is when the theory or framework is junked because it no longer works as well as a new idea, and people have to get their minds around the new explanations. The first is easy and desired by most of the population. A good example is the post-war liberal consensus. It delivered more and more goods, and it explained and solved an expanding range of political problems. In science, Newtonian physics is still going strong and deals with most of what engineers want it to deal with.
The second type of progress is hard work in comparison. Revolutions in politics, and paradigm changes (like the Copernican revolution) in science.
I suspect a lot of the malaise around at the moment is due to people realising that the old narratives which used to sustain them will not work, but being reluctant to think outside of the box. It's now obvious that we won't get more and more affluent and better educated with each generation, and that conflicts won't be managed away in some pleasant realm where we can all be individuals yet share a consensus. We don't know how to deal with people who migrate here and yet hate us, with murders caused by religious difference, and with the insistence by bearded betesticled chaps that they are in fact lay-deez. Things are going to be shaken up a bit.
Sam - conservatives have a difficult problem in that we are where we are, could have done better, but is is almost impossible to define where we went wrong without seeming to be just another reactionary.
Better decisions could have been made, but had they been made, we'd be in an imaginary situation which isn't easy to present as a better version of now and not just a rose-tinted version of the past.
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