Anytime they need your support the most would if you are long time follower a Library Programming in person or online, you know we lean heavily on the humanities but tonight we turn our attention to the sciences albion with a heavy dose of the humanities. Our guest is michael strevens, here and his phd at rutgers university. His book the knowledge machine how irrationality created modern science is i think critically important at a time when distrust of science is on the rise. The book begins with a simple question with a not at all simple answer. Why did it take 2000 years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics for humans to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe . The answer as it turns out might also help us better understand why we should have more faith in the Scientific Community. Michael strevens, thank you for joining us. Guest thanks very much, great to be here and talk a little bit about the book. And about what i am sitting out to do. I wrote this book to answer two questions i had about science. One of those questions is simply how is it, it reveals to us the secrets of the universe and tells us how strings and molecules create life, taken some of us to the moon, there is a lot to make life much better. What is it, what is sciences lifeline to the truth, to all of this knowledge . On the right track, looking into the world and gathering evidence that makes science very powerful. Summarize it like this, you give a theory only for degrees with what we see out there in the world, we give a credit only if it agrees with what we see out there in the world. The story about evidence cant be the entire explanation and here is why. These words were written by aristotle, a greek philosopher first writing 2000 years ago. Aristotle did not convince science, for all those marvelous discoveries we had to wait another two millennia. Something is going on in modern science, a certain way of treating or looking at the evidence perhaps that wasnt around in aristotles time. One is a more specific question about the success of science. What is science doing with the evidence that makes it so successful and so much more successful, and why does it take so long to figure out how to do it. And it is beautiful, it is a little bit wrong, i take that idea and developed week, change it a little bit into something that answers both these questions. The idea i begin with is the most famous philosopher of science who wrote his most famous book, the structure of scientific revolution published in 1962 and it is in this book he laid out the view of scientific progress as a series of what he called paradigm shifts. His idea was at any particular time of Certain Branch of science, astronomy or physics or biology is run according to a kind of a plan, a worldview to which he attached this paradigm and when there are great changes in scientific thinking about the world what happens is one of these paradigm shifts so for example in the seventeenth century, the astronomical paradigm in which the planet orbited the sun was replaced by copernicuss paradigm, sorry, the earth, the planets orbit the sun or the Twentieth Century newtons paradigm in which gravity is a force exerted by master rightly on other masses, replacing the paradigm in which mass twists the structure of spacetime. It was important the paradigm is not just big and exciting, but that in a certain more profound and almost totalitarians sense, the scientists mind so the scientists stuck in the paradigm, they cannot think outside it and it is a good thing. How could that be . How can it be a certain, the inability to imagine other possibilities, could be a good thing and promote scientific progress. Paradigm is full of promises. It is also a recipe for finding the answer to any question, any question about astronomy or gravity, with the right kind of paradigm. Most of the time, scientists are simply applying this recipe but because scientists are convinced the current paradigm is correct they think this is the recipe, the only recipe, the one and only recipe that if they follow it creates a satisfying picture of the world. It sounds a little more dangerous, why should this be a good thing . A quote from the book, what the paradigm does, by focusing the scientists on a few things the paradigm says are terrifically important and must be investigated very carefully, i am going to read his word, for science cysts to investigate in depth, in a way that is unimaginable, it is not unimaginable but unattainable. Let me take you on a brief tour of a few scientific experiments, the kind of detail and depth essential to science and the commitment to a paradigm would never be built, carried out. It was successful a few weeks ago and winning it createa nobel prize, the gravitational waves, this is just one small partone large part of the periment. Which consists of several complexes like this. Long structures you can see, so straight that they can detect tiny movementsreated by gravitational was a fraction of the size of a proton. It took 50 years to build these things in a way that would finally succeed with many reversals around the way, the reat of losing funding, experiments at produced no results. 50 years, finally got their results. This is the kind of focus th is necessary to make, enormous progress to tune up the details but it will take a more personal, incredibly grueling scientif enterprise. This is a tiny island in the Galapagos Islands half a mile across, two biologists have been going through this island every summer for the lt 40 years, they ve been tracking pulations the same as the gapagos looking at evolution and literallyracking every single bird. That requires quite the commitment. One of the many interesting discovies, most exciting of all is the creation of an enrely new species through hybridization, not too many yearsgo, probably 40 years, a focus on detail and debt, producing beautiful and citing piece of evidence that i suspect neither you nor i could imagine doing the work to carry out. This is the molecular structure of hormones, the structure was finally discovered in 1969 as a result of the race, the greatest obstacle was not a complicated theoretical question are difficult, to to the appropriate experiments. There he is. Really the most impornt factor in this prect, crhing out andistilling them for the substce. That is the focus that is requed, allows us to make progress, something human beings, likely to think of doing. He thinks scientific progress is possible because nevertheless they do it and the reason is because they are utterly convinced there paradigm is correct, the recipe for doing science nnot fail. They push that recipe so hard, they apply it to everything, every la drop of truth and in doing that, they crush the life out of it. That is how the paradigm is destroyed, creating the new paradigm and ultimately triggering paradigm shift. And and and a high moral tenor, it is a success of padigm. And the ki of motivation. And we have to ask. And to convince the paradigm is correct so they dont have the confidence to block out the alternativ and chase this. Many historians and sociologists have been hugely influenced by him and ended up being very skeptical scientists really are, and at the large hadron collider, another of those expensive complicad experiments, we find evidence against the standard model, the current wisdom, the scientists are noconvinced, they want to find a way it goes wrong. That is not what kuhn would have predicted. On a smaller scale, a french sociologist went into the lab, one of the discoverers of that, requir the extraction of so many brains, you dont need to look at this too closely, scientists in effect falling arou with the recipe, changing conditions for what counts as a success to outfox their competitors so inste of the paradigm being recipe, the scientistsre rewriting the scripture to suit themselves to promote their own ambitions. Seems that kuhn do not have what he most needed whi was a kind of unthinking coitment. I love this story so much i nted to appoint something about it. What is right about it is the idea science is a peculiar institution for motivating scientists to perform experiments, dig out facts, conduct measurements that are so expensive, so timeconsuming, they simply would not do these things in any other circumstance it is a motivational technology and they are ultimely responsible for progress. Let me tell you how that works. We should think about the rules of science not as something scientists unthinkingly believe or Something Like a religious governmental rules of the game. Scientist wants to play the game so they agreed to abide by it. The most important rule is this wool, the evidence rule, that evidence would be critical. Only empirical evidence, it is at the absolute core, the kernel of science. Insofar as there is such a thing as a scienfic method, it lays down a test that tells u what empirical evidence, the ccessful argument conducted on the empirical test. It prohibits a philosophical argument, arguments iill say a little bit more about this. It will like that is wide open, not as limiting as the paradigms. And a lot of disagreement. It doesnt tell scientists how to interpret the evidence they produce, they disagree a lot but it doecreate access. Everyone agrees, all the scientists agree every argument they have is resolved by conducting, making some observation and they agree about what is irrelevant. This is a kind of consensus on how to go on. The reason this rule is so important even though it doesnt say much is it has these functions. It binds scientists together because they agree how to go forward. Second it pits them against one another arguing their series against rival theories or simply planning to find out e truth. In a way that means evidence is continually generated and in fact evidence is the only way to win an argument, to win an argument you have to find some small fact that your theory accommodates better than your rivals, to investigate nature in kuhns detailing that. Not that scientists are addicted to what kind of recipe. There are many recipes out there. They have that kuhnem property of pushing scientists to go deep deep deep into the details, deeper than any reasonable person might care to go and the result is the progress and convergen on truth we see around us. A great pile of evidence of not just any of it but detailed, thorough. Okay. A few minutes le. I promised to answer not just the question of science as relation to the evidence but also the question of why it was so late to come along. Even though aristotle saw the importance of observation and observation evaluating biology and force and everything he wrote about. Why was he not involved in science . The answer is although he thought empirical evidence, he didnt think only empirical evidence counted. He thought phisophy too was extremely important. Skip forward to plato writing 2000 years later. Remember him as a philosopher, not a scientist even though he wrote extensely about it. Why is he not a scientist . Because he too thinks empirical evidence is not the only thing that counts when figuring out the truth. His great philosophical system he acknowledged ultimately depend on the knowledge of god, he is a great rationalist but its together his theology and philosophy and physics into one beautiful unified package but it is too beautiful and too unified. It distracts him as aristotle was distracted bhis philosophy, from the empirical evidence so he doesnt go as deep let me look at one more thing. Undeniably a modern scientist, anempirical evidence isnt the only thing that counts. Simplicity and elegance are ve important in deciding on the correct hypothesis. Only empirical evidence counted get here is the modern physicist who like aristotle is saying aesthet thinking count as well. Why wasnt he distracted from looking at empical evidence. The answer, may have personally thought beauty was important and ny modern citizens think beauty is important but nevertheless playing the science game, another physicists, put the elegant universe, aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse. That doesnt count. He can praise beauty or use beauty as an inspiration but whene goes to argue, publish papers putting forward for example, he is literally for bitten from invoking beauty as a reason to say s theory. All he is able to do is point to empirical evidence. He has got to pot to new predictions s theories make, shows how they conform to what we already know aboutarticles of which the universe is made. So the game forces guiltma in his private life and all of science, every modern scientist to win the end make their case with empirical evidence and that means the experimenters teing their theoriesthey have to do it kuhn thought was essential to modern science whh is to take out the details. The upshot of this when it gets to my explanation is the rules of scientific argument that only empirical evidence counts strictly speaking irrational. Suddenly looks that way or should look that way to practicing scientists and everyone who came before practicing scientists. A basic principle of rational argument every logician and philosopher will agree on, when deliberating about something important you should take into account the relevant considerations at least relent considerations that are not too expensiv someonlike gilman thinks aesthetic reasons, the beay of a theory is highly relevt, eagerly available to these citizens and yet participating in a game of scientific argument that does not allow him in his argument to invoke beauty. The game enjoins them to public argument to violate rationality. In fact as i said, it is precisely because of this, scientists may not appeal to other factors no matter how important they think they are because they must focus on the evidence so for modern science to be created, the crucial feature of science to be discovered or to be written down and acted upon the human race has to stumble on the fact that this irrational a narrow rule worked really well and that took a long time. I have much more to say in my book the knowledge machine how irrationality created modern science. I have many more illustrations of things i said about science, historical stories about the way in which any rationally narrow rule was hit upon. I hope i interested you enough to read the book, thank you very much. Thank you very much, michael strevens. If anyone has questions you can put them in the chat box for the comments. We have time for 5 or 6 but i want to start with this. One of the things early on that surprised me and for whatever reason, this theory that you can disprove any number of scientific theories but of the ones that remain it is not possible to assign likelihood to one over the other. The philosopher i dont think his view is entirely correct, an important part, scientists have views about the likelihood that havent yet been disproven but have wildly different views, there is disagreement about these theories. Would rather have simply wiped the disagreement away from science and had science turned only on something that was purely objective which was a possibility of recalcitrant fact, how to disprove a theory. In the end he couldnt make that stick. The reason there is so much disagreement is the recalcitrant details that ultimately undermine, produced frequently and extremely complicated ways, show you pictures of the apparatus involved and it is always possible the apparatus is not working correctly. I tell the book of edisons famous expedition in 1919, establishing einsteins theory of relativity. Three telescopes making observation, one of them agrees with newton better than einstein, that something went wrong with it. Certainly nothing like it, that is the way it is generally with science, tremendous disagreements, the evidence that can be trusted, great disagreement about what theories to believe that doesnt matter as long as scientists go on producing the right evidence. Eventually as it did with relativity theory, einstein proved to be more on the right track than newton, what we find, convernce of opinion. That leads to audience question. Think about early discoveri, the thought process, h might the application of modern science haveffected those discoveries, part of the book where you talk about the idea of the water was the essence of everything, no, air, no, fire, how might modern scientific theory have affected those scientific arguments . Those early arguments in many ways were wonderful. They throw around these ideas and another character if i am not mistaken, the very early sixteenth century at the beginning of the scientific revolution, these are scientific ideas. We now know the world is not entirely made of water. The thought that the world is part of the fundamental constituent, responsible for the many Different Things we see around us, that turned out to be exactly right. The idea of the atom. That is the wonderful stuff. Around 2 and a half thousand years ago, that was being debated and turned around. If you like protoscientists, really did not know how to test them. Not that they didnt understand the connection to the evidence but they thought it leads, who thought everything was made of water thought the beer he was a nice explanation of certain features of the world. They had their good stories and looking back to at half thousand years later we can see the quality of those explanations lovely though those explanations was not enough to decide between them. What was needed was the small detail, by developing instruments that, the structure of what turned out to be tiny particles that make up matter to answer these questions. We dnt know what was made of it. Two audience questions. Are there historical parallels first skepticism and in some cases rejection of science that we see today . I think that science has always been controversial. Probably one of the most striking historical cases was the development of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, darwins idea that all life had a common origin, not created separately by god but molded by Natural Selection going back to galileos argument, a more conventional view by the Catholic Church that the sun, i keep getting this wrong, the earth is the center of the universe, so there has always been powerful forces that for reasons of their own had to do with prevailing religious dogma, not wanted to listen to scientists and it has been possible for them not to listen because science is full of this kind of disagreement and dissent. It wasnt just religious authorities looked down on darwin. It was a biologists equally concerned with empirical evidence, so if you expect science to proclaim what the evidence shows, we look at what science is really like, plenty of material, any kind of motor, what turns out to be the right way of looking at things. Related to that another audience question, does irrationality lead nonscientists to buy into claims of pseudoscience . The disagreement i am talking about is more important. The irrationality i am pointing to is a subtle thing. Many scientists would recognize the elements i point to and juxtaposed, on the one hand you say theoretical beauty is important but on the other hand you are agreeing to play by rules and ignore it. The idea that is irrational is not being pointed out very vigorously. The idea scientists disagree with one another, one scientist can be convinced they are right and turn out to be completely wrong is something very wellknown to anyone who looks into the actual history of science or the sociology of science. If someone committed fraud for whatever reason to pseudoscience, easy to disparage conventional scientific opinions. Far less knowledge or justice, the same technique science use with one another. It is just not trustworthy. Some wonderful studies of science, scientists reported all of these, they nt write this down, they talk this way to one another all the time. Is not so easy to write back about this, equally large amounts of skepticism, with these endeavors. Host speak to th idea, and may be right now, string theory a quantum mechanic and the idea that there isnt really a foreseeable path to proving these theories. What is the longterm effects going to be of these ideas tha we dont see a way to prove them . Guest i write about that at the end of the book. The onlyay to test string theory will involve amounts of energy so vast that entire galaxies would have to be harnessed to conduct the experiment. It is not clear that that i correct but it might be correc it might be impossible to use the usual tools to test, great that scientists are committed to usingmpirical evidence to resolve this, the production of empirical evidence involves an endeavor on that scale then sciencruns into a giant obstacle. D change the rules of the game i was talking aut before. Post empirical physics pays more attentiono the elegance. We lose that laserlike focus on it that is absolutely critical to science and success. We have two more questions. Well go to this one first. Does limiting the Scientific Community mainstream light pose a danger to Public Discourse . Im sorry, mainstream mainstream light. Im not entirely sure what that is maybe thats a typo. Can you just talk a little bit about the limitations that the Scientific Method puts on research, how does it impact Public Discourse . So we are in opposition sometimes where scientists are disagreeing on important things but we as a society need to act. We need in the face of uncertainty make some kind of plans. We go to science and what we get rather than an opinion on what the evidence is showing we get a lot of site is disagreeing with one. What do we do . We need some kind of the body which is going to in a certain sense stand up side of science to examine the range of opinion and to find what is going to be in the end something thats more like a middle of the road rather than consensus. In the case of climate change, we have the u. N. Well, the ipcc it is called whose role mainly consisted of situs but whose role is not to do science but fully understand and technology with a great deal a disagreement about the details of climate change, not that its occurring but a fast its occurring, what the most important drivers of the change our. Take that information entered into the kind of numbers that, however much they are come sometimes religious educated guesses at the numbers we need to make a decision like how should we build the seawalls. We cant rely on science to simply give us the facts. We need to build a deliberative body when the facts are important enough to interpret science for us. Thatind of answers the last question. Instead i will ask you this. When wealk about that body that is goi to interpret the science and help us assign likelihoods which goes back to that theory earlier that you cant dohat, that necessari has to exist outside of the Scientific Community, doesnt it . Even if its made u of situs come its outside thecientific community and doing something that is not one of t functions of signs for which therere no rules iide science. Yes. Some people hav suggested that we dont even need a scientists for these kind of bodies. Fo example, create a kind of civilian jury to assess the evence, and whether that actually physical or nott gives you a sense to what the job reay is. Namely, not doing science but finding some kind of convergence of opini where possible or were not possible simply taking an average, taking the temperature ofpinion, finding a middle of the road estimate for the kinds of numbe that we really need to, well, in many cases to avo disaster. We are seeing the same things of course with covid. We have numbers like the r factor or the k k factor becaue thats iortant to know about and yet which are often very difficult to determine at the relatively early stages and is just on all the evidenc we would like to have. Theres one more question and i find this interting. We talk a lot about distrust of science in modern society but its not really exclusive to sciee. We see people questioning the humaniti as well and history in particular whether its rethinking of hitler or rewriting the confederacy. Is there something in society thats causing thisistrust not just the size but established academia . Not just the science academics, humanists, anybody else, we are all human and we all have our ulterior motives and these motives to some extent affect what we do. We are not terrible people on the whole although there are some terrible people but certain amount of distrust is healthy. A certain amount of understanding that the process of science, the process of humanistic discourse in history, for that matter philosophy, that the process is consisting and the contributions of individuals whose opinions about things that really matter are colored by in these prejudices, their ambitions. That is a very realistic way to understand whats going on in any kind of intellectual disposal, probably any kind of human endeavor at all. On the other hand, its important to see what kinds of structures and safeguards not only the ones you expect are in the place to deal with these ulterior motives. So in science with a great amount of disagreement and some of it is coming out of just pure difference of intellectual taste and some of it is coming out of a certain kind of self interest. Often totally innocent. Of course i think that my instruments its not that i simply telling a story about them. But when an institution works well, what it does is it finds ways he to a certain extent neutralize those agreements and often disagreements, and even to harness them, i think a lot of good is done by naked ambition and science as scientists choose toward this energy into the science again come into the creation of more and more detail evidence. There are certain kinds of there are really two kinds of ways of diminishing the negative effect. What is shortterm and ones longterm. The shortterm one is a bit shaky but its the fact with many, many different opinions, meaning many different voices. So as long as site is not entirely captured by scientific dictator which is very unlikely given the way it is structured, there are many forces to look at. We should be rightly suspicious of one voice but we shouldnt come at the same time we shouldnt entirely throw in our lot with another voice. We should step back and look at the whole picture, or put our trust in somebody who does this for us. Thats in the short term. In the longer term what we have is a simple accumulation of evidence that begins to more and more point the way to the few theories that really are capable of dealing with all the small, very demanding facts. I think that is a good place to end things. The book again is the knowledge machine. Give it a look. Its a fascinating history. Outstanding, well done, doctor strengthens. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you very much. Weeknights this month were teaching tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight its a look at business and economics. That all begins at 8 p. M. Eastern, and enjoy booktv this weak and every weekend on cspan2. Booktv on cspan2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Coming up this weekend watch booktv on cspan2 this weekend, and be sure to watch in depth life sunday december 6 at noon eastern with our guest author and chair of africanamerican studies at