We will get to as many as we can and if youre interested in purchasing the knowledge machine its available in most retailers. If youre a longtime follower of Library Programming either in person or online, you know that we lean heavily on the humanity. But tonight we turn our attention to the sciences with heavy dose of humanities. Our guest dr. Stevens, professor in new york his book the knowledge machine. The book begins with a simple question with a not at all simple answer. Why did it take 2,000 years after invention of philosophy and mathematic 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. Dr. Stevens thank you very much for joining us. Thanks very much. Great to be here. I will talk a little bit about this book and what im setting out to do. I wrote the book to answer two Big Questions that i had about science. One of those questions is simply how is it tt sciences is so success,eveals to us the secrets of the universe and tells us how stringsnd lecules can great life and taking some of us to the move and back here on earth. Whats sciences lifeline to the trut to to all of this knowledge . We a typical answer to this question. One that is certainly on the right ack is that the story has to do somhing with evidence. Theres something about looking out into the wor and gathering evidence that makes science very powerful. You might summarize it like this. We give a theory only if it agrees with what we see in the world, we give it credit only if we see it out in the world. I think the story ant cant been the entire explanation. The words were written by aristoe, greek scientist, aristotle did not invent science. We have t wait another 2 millennial oh something is goingn in modern science,ertainly or lookin at the evidence perhaps that wasnt around in aristotle time one is more a specific question about success of science. What is it that modern science doing with the evidence that makes it so successful and much successful than ancient greek philosophy. My inspiration comes as philosopher of science from an idea which i think is beautiful and deep and also a little bit wrong and in my book i take that idea and i i give it a tweak. I change it a little bit into something that really does answer both of the questions. The idea i begin with is due the most thing plosopher of science thomas who wrote in the middlef the last century, the structure ofcientific revolutions published in 1962 and its in this book that coon laid out progress of scientific progress in a series thats paradigm shift. His idea with any branch of science, say astronomy or som part of physics or biology is n according to a kind of a plan, totalizing world view for which it attached own paradigm and when there are great changes in our scientific thinkg about the world, what has happened is one of the paradigm shifts, so, for example, in the 17th century astronical paradigm in which the planetted orbited the sun sorry, over the earth, of course, or at the beginning of the 20th century newtons paradigm on which gravity is a force extended by other mass and mass twists the structure of spe time. It was very important to coon that paradigm is not just big and exciting but in a certain more profound almost totalitarian sense, it rules the scientists minds, okay. So the sciensts as it were in some sense stuck in the paradigm, they cant think outside of it. Thats a good thing accding to coon. So how can that be. Why how could it be that a certain kind of narrative in sciences or imagine other possibilities could be a good thing, could promote scientific progress. Well, here is how coons answer goes, the paradigm is full of promise, full of promises. What it offers the sentist is recipe for finding the answer to any question within t paradigm scope, any question from astronomy, any question about gravity for the right kind of paradigm and physics. And most of the time normally and calledormal science, sciee is applying the recipe, because the science is to convince that the current paradigm is correct, they think that this is the recipe, the only recipe and that its the one andnly recipe that if they follow it will give them a full and satisfying pictu of the world. Okay. Sounds more dangerous than it does promising. Why shoul this be a good thing . Here is what coon said in quote of his book, what t paradigm does is focusing the scientists on just a f things that the paradigm ss is terrifically important, a few problems that the paradm says must be investigated very carefully, perhaps very expensively. Im just going to read his words, fces science to investigate some part of nature in detl and depth that would other side be unimaginable. Certainly not unimaginable but unobtainable. What is he thinking here . I will take you on a brief tour of a few a few scientific experimes which will give you a sense o the kind of detail and depth that coons is essential to science. Here is one that was in the news recently created the nobel prize. This is just one small part rather, one large part of the experiment which consists now of several different complexes. Those longstraight stretches you can see have to detect, they can be so straight and so still that they can detect tinny movements created by gravitational legs that are are a fraction of the size of a pr overwhelm proton and many with threat of losing funding and long runs of experiments that produce no results because scientists stuck with those for those 50 years and got the results, this is the result that coons think is necessary to turn out details that really matter. Its half a mile across. Two biologists have been going to this island every summer for the last 40 years. Its about a it looks. Theyve been tracking populations of cinches, the famous cinches in the galapagos. That requires commitment. One of interesting discoveries, thats the most exciting at all, observing the creation of entirely new species through hybridization. Probably about 40 years after they started going there. A focus on detail and depth producing a really beautiful and exciting piece of evidence that i suspect need i could really imagine doing the work to carry out. One more. This is the molecular structure of releasing hormone, hormone in the brain which structure was discovered in 1969 as a result of race actually between two scientists andrew and rosa, to discover that the greatest obstacle was not some difficult question but difficult calculation but producing enough of the substance to actually do the appropriate experiments. Asle shally says, there he is, really that the most important factor in this project was spending as he says here an entire year crushing up in this case big braining and thats the kind of focus that science requires and allows us to make progress in science. Its something that human beings in their normal happy state are very unlikely to think of doing. Scientific progress is possible because nevertheless they do do it. And the reason they do it is because they are incorrectly as it usually turns out, utterly convinced that their paradigm is correct and recipe for doing science cannot fail. They push that recipe so hard they they apply it to everything, they try to squeeze out every last drop of truth and in doing that, they discover its flaws, they crush the like out of it and thats how a paradigm is destroyed, creating the need for a new paradigm and ultimately triggering a paradigm shift. Thats a marvelous story. Its a story where the real secret of science is not intellectual or logical. Its not some kind of high moral tenure, its a kind of institution, institution of successive paradigms whose most important effect is simply to provide a kind of motivation, motivation is all. Well, i said its a beautiful story about paradigm change so theres a science so we have to ask, was coon right, its essential to coons picture that scientists are convinced, really convince the paradigm is correct so they wouldnt have the confidence in it to block out all of the alternatives and just chase one way of doing things. Many historians and sociologists working with coon although hugely influenced by him have ended up being skeptical that scientists really are so blanket when this is a bunch those expensive things. We want to break this and find evidence of the current par time. The scientists are not convinced by the recipe, they want to find a way that goes wrong. Thats not what coon would have predicted. On a much smaller scale on a famous book of sociology of science, french sociologist went into the lab of roger and i was talking about moment ago, the one that required extraction of stuff from so many brains. You dont need to look at this too closely but he finds a place where scientists in effect fooling around with the recipe and broadcast with the success. Some holy scripture, the scientists are rather rewriting the scriptures to suit themselves and promote their own ambition. Here it looks like its the scientist in charge and not the paradigm. It seems that coon, that coon does not have what he most needed which is a kind of unthinking commitment to the paradigm. But still, i love the story so much, i wanted to find something right about it. I think whats right about it is the idea that science is a very peculiar institution for motivating scientists to perform experiments, to dig out facts, to conduct measurements that are so expensive, so time consuming, so moral sectored that they simply would not do these things and any other circumstances in the context of institution, its a motivational technology. And its what drives scientists to uncover the facts that are ultimately responsible for progress. Let me tell you a little bit about how i think that works. I think we should think of the rules of science not as something that scientists unthinkingly believe but rather like the rules of the game but scientists want to play the game and so they agree to abide by the rules. The most important rule is the rule, is this rule, its the evidence rule. I said that evidence would be critical, only impurecal evidence counts. Thats at the absolute core science. What is that . It lays down or an empirical test and it tells you what empicircal is. So it prohibits any other kind of argument in particular prohibits, for example, philosophical arguments but i will say a little more about this later. Okay. Now those, a rule like that is actually very wide open. Its not nearly as limited as one of coons par time and allows for disagreement. It doesnt tell scientists how to interpret the evidence they produce and, in fact, they disagree a lot in how to interpret the evidence but it does create a certain kind of consensus, everyone agrees, all the scientists agree that every argument they have is to be resolved by conducting some experiment, some motivation and they agree which kinds of experiment observations are relevant. They have this kind of consensus on what counts to move the game and how to go on. The reason the rule is so important even they it doesnt say much, is that it has these functions. First of all, it simply binds scientists together in a single argument because they know how to move forward and second it puts them against in favor one another and in a way that evidence is continually generated and in fact, because evidence is the only way to win an argument, to win an argument you have to have some small fact that your theory accommodates better than your rivalsheory and so it givesou the motivation to investigate nature coons detail and depth. Its not that scientis are addicted to one kind of recipe. There are many recipes out there but theyre all recipes that have thatuhnian property of pushing scientists to go into the details, perhaps where one care to go and the result is progress in science and convergent on truth that we see around that. Thorough, deep evidence. Okay. Well, i have a few minutes left and thats just as well because i promised to answer not just the question of what science what sciences relation to the evidence is that it should be successful but also the question of why it was so late to come along, why why us it that aristotle clearly saw the importance and formi to observation in evaluating, biology and force and evething else he wrote about, why was he not a modern scientist . The answer is that although he though emperical counted, he thought philosophy was extremely important. Lets move forward, we remember him as a philosopher and not a scientist even though he wrote, tensively about physics. Why is he not a scientist because he too think that empirical evidence is not the only thing that counts to figuring out the truth. He knits together philosophy and physics into a beautified package but its too beautiful and too unified and distracts him as aristotle is distracted. This is Nobel Prize Winner in physics. Here telling us that empirical is not the only thing that counts and beauty and elegance are important in deciding on the correct hypothesis. Wait a minute, you may be thinking, am i contradicting myself. Here is a modern physicist like aristotle thinking, weigh wasnt he looking at empirical evidence. The answer is that however much he may have personally thought that beauty was important and as many think beauty is important, nevertheless playing the game and theres brian green likely puts it, another another physicist in his book the elegant universe. Esthetics judgments do not arbitrate discourse, esthetic judgments dont count. He can use beauty as inspiration but when he goes publishes paper he is literally forbidden from invoking beauty as a reason to say his theories. All hes allowed to do is point to empirical evidence and show how they conform to what we already know about about the particles of which universe is made. So the game forces goman and thinks in his private life and forces every modern science to in the end make their case with empirical evidence and that means they are the experiments is what is testing their theories just like they have to do what thought was essential to modern science which is which is dig out the details. An upshot of this and this will finally get to my explanation of why science is too late. Is it the rules that say only empirical evidence counts are truly speaking irrational or should look that way to practice ing practicing scientists. Rational argument that every philosopher will agree on. That when you are deliberating about something important, you should take into account all levant considerations, at least all relevant considerations that are n too expensive to take into account. Well, someone like goman thinks that esthetic reasons, beauty of a theory is something thats highly relevant. Furmore its available as judgment for beauty come easily to physicist and yet hes participating in a game of scientific argument that does not allow him in his argument for his theories, public arguments to invoke beauty, so in other words, the game enjoins him in public argument to violate rationality, in fact, as i said, scientific are well precised, because scientists may not appeal to the other factors no matter how imptant they think they are because they must focus on the evidence. Written down and actedpon, the human rights have to somehow stumble on the fact that this rationly narrow rule worked really well and that took a long time. Ll, i have much more toay about about this in my book, knowledge machine. I have many more illustrations about things i said about science, historical stories about the way in which, what i call rule finally hit upon. I hope that ive interested you enough that you will go and read the book. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you vermuch, again, if anybody in the audience has questions they can put those in the chat box or in the comment. Think we have time for maybe 5 or 6. But i wt to start with this, michael. I found a lot of things interesting in the book, but one of the things early on that surpsed me and for whatever reason, the theory that you can disprove any number of scientif theories but of the one that remain it is not possible to assign likelihood one over t other and can you talk about thatnd where its gone . Sure. The view that you just mentioned is a view of philosopher. I dont think his view is entirely correct. Its an important part of the texture of science. They have different views. Theres a huge amount of disagreement about the disagreement from science and had science turn only on something that was purely objective which is the possibility that i think the fact would prove theory. In the end he couldnt make that stick. The tinny details that ultimately undermine paradigms, they are all produced frequently in extremely complicated ways. I showed you pictures of apparatus involved and its always possible. Turns out that edington has 3 different telescopes making observations and all give different rules. He had reasons to thinking that and he certainly didnt have anything like that. Thats the way it is generally with science. Theres certainly first tremendous disagreement about whose evidence can be trusted and great disagreement about what theories to believe but it doesnt matter as long as scientists go on producing the right kind of evidence and eventually enough piles up. Eventually the evidence piles up that we find convergence of opinion, consensus. That leaves to an audience question. If you think about early discoveries, the early thought process how might the application of modern science have affected some of those discoveries and i think about part of the book where you talk about the idea of the water was the the essence of everything and no, its air, no its higher, how might modern scientific theory affected the arguments . Well, those early arguments in many way wonderful. Was a great philosopher who threw around the ideas and another character in my book Francis Baker writing in early 16th century, the beginning of the scientific revolution. These are these are generally scientific ideas. Of course, we now know that the world is not entirely made of water. Theres thought that the world is less complicated than it looks but theres fundamental constituents and arrangements of that constituents are responsible for many Different Things around us. That idea turned out to be exactly right. Thats the idea of goman and thats wonderful stuff. That around 2 and a half thousand years ago when theories were being debated and turned around. The the philosophers or scientists really did not know how to test them. Its not that they didnt understand the connection to the evidence, they thought they everything was made of water and thought it was nice explanation of certain features of things, certain features of the world, for example. Its just that they each had their good stories and looking back now 2 and a half thousand years later we can see that the quality of those exclamations was not enough. What was needed was that truly in small detail. Its really only by developing instruments that can part to discern the structure what turned out to be the incredibly tinny particles that make up matter that we begin to answer the questions. Isnt that correct, even the newtons day, we didnt know what the world was made of. A discovery of the last 200 years. We have two audience questions that are kind of related. I will start with this one, is there historical parallels for skepticism a