Is Science Progressive?

"Progressive" has two definitions: (1) gradual and continuous, slowly developing over time. (2) liberal, modern, and “enlightened”. We could discuss how this concept varies from culture to culture and how language shapes how we view “progressiveness”ness, but at least from the IB's standpoint, from a modern/western perspective, favoring innovation is viewed as something positive. We want to improve our lives, we want innovation, we want technology. We want more, at least in our western schema. 

Science, unlike math, does not work with strict, unchanging axioms. It seeks to find patterns in nature to synthesize and explain such phenomena. Through math, reason (induction and deduction), observation, and evaluation in the scientific community, scientists formulate theories and laws that simplify everything around us, making it predictable and measurable. What distinguishes science from fields like psychoanalysis or numerology, is its “falsifiability, or refutability, or testability," as Popper put it. According to Karl Popper, what defines a theory as scientific (not true, useful, or precise. Scientific.) is its “risk factor," where every test is an attempt to falsify it. Like Newton’s law of gravitational force, it can be or it can’t be, there is no middle ground. Freud’s theories cannot be deemed as scientific because everything serves as a confirmation. They do not “prohibit" anything from happening, unlike the second law of thermodynamics, where entropy of an isolated system never decreases. If we were to find a single instance where entropy (in an isolated system) actually decreases, then it is completely undone. That’s an enormous “risk factor”. Because we have never found such instance after centuries of study and observation, this law can be deemed as scientific, and perhaps even true (and to some, beautiful or terribly sad). But we are not looking for truth, not right now. Entropy and thermodynamics could be human constructions based on patterns found in random occurrences, making our quest for truth a bit too much to handle at the moment. Back to science. One important aspect of science is its quest to classify and simplify. The periodic table, taxonomy, the new possible periodic table of particles, etc., are part of scientists' attempt to sort all there is in the universe. Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution helps us visualize this activity. Its as if “science” seeks to build the jigsaw puzzle of the universe by connecting all that we observe and creating patterns through laws and theories. When we notice an anomaly, a piece that just does not fit into the puzzle we are building, we are forced to switch things around until we find a way to successfully incorporate that piece into the puzzle. 

Much like the TOK truth tests, science also has to pass through three tests, the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic tests. These tests also indicate the very purpose of science, which would be to correctly categorize/classify our surroundings to make them predictable (correspondence), create a foundation with laws and theories that can generate more knowledge through deduction (coherence), and find ways to make use of this knowledge(pragmatic). This leads to scientific knowledge, which might not necessarily be the way things actually are? Why does gravity exist? What explains this attraction between two masses? As Mr. Cross would say, "It just is. Live with it”. Perhaps the manner in which we perceive this phenomena has been the very cause of this problem. The law of gravitation, a simple equation, created the concept of gravity. Gravity is not a phenomena, it's not a thing, it is just a description of the behavior of objects which allows us to predict and quantify exactly how they will move. If all of science works like that, if electromagnetism is just a description and not a thing that actually happens, science works a lot like math. It’s excellent in making predictions and categorizations, but it isn’t what nature is. However, gravity does pass the three scientific truth tests and is the basis of a lot of our understanding of the universe. Thus, to an extent, besides using reason, language (for communication and categorization, which could have an impact on the way we perceive certain things), imagination (to picture our models and representations), perception (for observations), memory, much like math science also relies on faith. Faith that what we have/know is what “it" is. 

This podcast from NPR, offers an interesting example (from 14:48, although I strongly recommend listening to the entire thing). Many theoretical physicists believe that science will reach a point where everything that is anything will be understood by humans, or their computers. But if multiple universes besides ours were to exist, the entire focus of science would have been just wrong. All of our constants, laws, and theories would have only explained how things work on our universe without considering what patterns might rule the other ones. They used an interesting analogy. Kepler dedicated a lot of his studies trying to explain why the earth was 93 million miles away from the sun. Why? Why 93 million? Is there an equation, or law that can explain this value? But once we start realizing that there are stars, nebulas, planets, and whatever else we can imagine, tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of millions of miles away from the sun, the number 93 million becomes “arbitrary”. We thus shift our focus from the 93 million to the relative distances between Earth and Jupiter, our sun and Betelgeuse, the Milky Way and Andromeda, gaining knowledge on gravity, orbits, ellipses, and more. By gaining awareness of these other bodies around us, we gain a much larger perspective and can finally start asking the right questions. If many universes were to exist, all that we know would perhaps not be enough to explain “everything”. But just as scientists have done in the past, when revolutions such as the discovery of oxygen, relativity, quantum physics, and Galileo observations shattered all its previous beliefs, they adjust and start over. Change (once the current system has been proven false) and improvement are the very foundations of scientific knowledge, for science’s quest to explain everything is infinite. This could point an answer to our question, making “progressive” one of science’s mission statements. Its willingness to change and adapt to better, more efficient or precise forms of classification (the definition of "better" could be further analyzed) makes this way of knowing something modern and innovative, thus, progressive. However, “switching things around” undoes a lot of progress and can make things very uncomfortable for scientists, thus, theories that seek to explain perceived “anomalies" must endure tests, observations, and close analysis in order to be recognized by the scientific community. And this is great, for it ensures the validity of such “discoveries”. Due to this long, tiresome process, the paradigms established by science are often believed to be very, very accurate, which then explains why new theories which threaten this set of “beliefs” are so closely analyzed. It works as a continuous cycle, but does not hinder real advance or revolution. Drawing the line between science, the study of the physical  world through observation and experiment, and the actual physical and natural world is also important. Science is progressive in its way of perceiving the universe and drawing patterns to simplify what we see. That does not necessarily mean its area of study is progressive. I’m not sure if there is any way to find out. Could it be that science, just like math, is just really good at establishing patterns and successfully predict events around us in a totally random, wild, unsystematic reality?

If we were to consider things in practical terms, whether science accurately describes the natural world is not as relevant as its potential to improve our lives. It has allowed us to cure various diseases, learn more about our bodies, use nature to our advantage (solar power, wind power, electromagnetism), and more. But once humans get involved, we start adding more factors into question, such as emotion, consciousness, and ethics. One problem scientific developments in the sector of health is the ethics of stem cell research. This sector has enormous potential to revolutionize our lives, but has been deemed by many as unethical due to its experimentation on “life”. This leads us to a question that not even science can fully explain. Where and when does life begin? Is a fertilized egg a “life”? It’s definitely alive, but to what extent would it be wrong to kill and experiment with it? When scientific development faces these issues, its “progressiveness" can be put into question, for although the word has a positive connotation, it can pose threats to our notions of “humanity”. The pros and cons of this can be extensively debated.

And then we face another problem. Until when can something be progressive? Shouldn’t something gradually evolving, gradually changing reach its final form and… stop? Assuming there our universe is all there is, will we reach a point where we have categorized and explained (in our own terms) everything there is to know? What would happen then? Would we start reshuffling our periodic tables, equations, and taxonomies to find another way to build this jigsaw puzzle? Or would this state of progressiveness extend until infinity?

Sorry for the long post.