In this post, I analyze the assumptions about science that are implicit in this picture.
1. Scientific advance can be measured in one dimension.
It is not entirely clear what this dimension is supposed to be (and how the aggregate from the contributions of different science is calculated), but the picture suggests that scientific advance is constituted by (or directly connected to) technological capability. While there might be some reasons to suggest that such connection exists, there also exist strong reasons to think that scientific advance and technological capability should be separated. First one in practical: Even if we were confident that science will ultimately produce technological breakthroughs, we should still need to have some additional dimensions for scientific advance. Otherwise it is difficult to tell (at least to the funding agents) what research seems promising. We want to be able to measure scientific advance before technological breakthroughs in order to know where those breakthroughs might be found. For example, a useful heuristic is to think scientific advances in two dimensions, empirical and theoretical. We can either make theoretical progress or gain empirical evidence or both. (See Pigliucci 2013). This leads us to the second reason: There is no guarantee that even a progressive science will lead to technological or practical advances anytime soon. At least history of science does not suggest this. H. Floris Cohen writes:
“The net outcome of the investigation, then, is that by 1700, when the Scientific Revolution came to some provisional completion [–] , the usual gap between craft practice and mathematical science yawned almost as widely as it had at the onset of the Revolution, about a century earlier. What exceptional crafts had already been successfully subjected to mathematical treatment over the 15th and 16th centuries either settled into routine (perspective, fortress building) or advanced under their own steam in the direction of gradually enhanced sophistication (determination of place on Earth, with measuring instruments and appended ‘Regiments’ serving as fairly effective mediators). In all other craft domains mathematics was either not applied at all or proved to overshoot its mark, thus in effect leaving the gap between them almost as wide as before. How is it that so much effort, always inventive, sometimes brilliant, was spent in vain?” (2010, 323.)
The answer Cohen gives is important:
“The most basic answer is that there was scarcely reason to suspect at the outset that the gap was so wide in the first place. A marvelous new tool of, in principle, great generality had become available, the subjection of the empirical world to mathematical rule and order Why, then, should the empirical world of craft practice fail smoothly to fall into line? Slowly but surely in the course of the Scientific Revolution a message was brought home to mathematical theorists to the effect that the gap could not be overcome by jumping over it in one big mathematical leap but required a good deal of patient, laborious bridge building.” (2010, 324).
There was a gap between mathematical science and its “technological applications”. Advancement of science does not seem to have a direct impact on technology from the historical point of view. (Notice also the advances that the Roman empire achieved according to the picture despite the scarcity of deep theoretical aspirations in the empire.)
One could perhaps argue that things have changed, and the gap does no longer exist. I have no expertise to judge how easy it is to transform a scientific advance into a technological breakthrough in today’s world. However, there probably exists some practical limitations to technological resources we could have to explore the space. For example, once the climate change disturbs our lives, there probably are not enough resources to develop sophisticated technology for space travelling.
2. Progress cannot be stopped, it can only be postponed
We already noted that this is probably not true. In today’s world, justifying unlimited optimism about the future of humankind requires rather strong arguments. This is related to the next point.
3. There was a continuous progress that was ruined by the Middle Ages
First of all, let us remind ourselves that the non-existence of modern science in Medieval Europe was not a consequence of the Catholic Church suppressing it. Not only is it anachronist to think that the people in Medieval Europe were concerned with the modern science but it also an error to think that there were some secret scientific laboratories in Medieval forests that the Church went on and burned to stop the progress. Modern science did not exist yet and the intellectual efforts of Medieval Europe were tightly connected to the Church and the counterfactual “had there not been the Catholic Church, science would have made process” makes little sense. There were cases of censorship but this does not change the overall picture.
Moreover, there was no continuous progress in the history of science (at least) before the scientific revolution. According to Cohen (2010, see the table on p. 149), there was a repeating pattern of an upswing followed by a downturn. There have been civilizations that appeared to have the potential for scientific revolution. These include Ancient Greece, Islamic civilization and Medieval Europe. In each case, there was a “golden era” of knowledge production followed by an “era of commentary” that did not, in general, produce great achievement. Medieval Europe and the downturn in its intellectual efforts was not an exception to the general pattern but an instance of it. It seems that through the history, there has been a “bottle neck” in the development of science: the structure of human societies and their interactions seems to make progress difficult. We should not ask why the scientific revolution did not happen but why it did:
“If [–] we wish to understand how kernels of “recognizably modern science” managed to stay in the world once they had arrived there, we ought to note first that their very survival was a close call – by midcentury the revolutionary movement was undergoing a veritable crisis of legitimacy. But, rather than losing momentum for good, a new political climate and the emergence, by the early 1660s, of an ideology for innovative nature-knowledge allowed the movement to regain pace.” (Cohen 2010, xvi.)
The birth of the modern science was not inevitable, and we should not blame earlier civilizations of postponing it.
4. Our imagination reveals how things could be
Popular culture and media are saturated with images and stories about space travelling. Growing up in such cultural settings makes it natural to think that, if we had more technological resources, exploration of space would be a natural thing to do. However, it is not obvious that if the history went otherwise – if the scientific revolution happened earlier – we would be exploring the space. It seems possible that humankind could also have focused on other thing – how to live a balanced life; how to build a particle accelerator much longer than the existing ones etc. For us it seems inevitable that the space race happened in the 20th century and we are inclined to think that this was due to the progress in science: Once we (or at least USA or the Soviet Union) had enough scientific expertise, the moon landing and satellites were inevitable. However, we should pay critical attention to this story. One could argue that it was the politics that drove science forwards. Had there not been political interest in space travel, scientific resources would have been spent otherwise. According to this perspective, the knowledge of space we have is the product of the pressure towards space travelling and not the other way round. I do not take stance on the credibility of this argument but I do think it is healthy to question where our images of scientific progress stem from. It is hardly the case that we have first examined the possible developments of science and only then extracted our hopes for the future from those developments. Rather, we project our ideas of desirable (or “cool” in the case of space travel) futures on the possible developments of science. And this is of course what we should do: We should direct our scientific resources to things we find desirable. But we should not hide the fact that choices are involved behind some obscure stories about the inevitable development of science. Neither should we think that science will achieve whatever we happen to dream of. There might not be a knockdown solution for climate change; and if the picture said “Just think about it… we could already have a comfortable technological solution for the climate change”, it would blind us from the reality. Imagination is valuable but sometimes it is better to stop listening Lennon and put on Mark Knopfler’s hit from the year 2000.
References:
Cohen, H. Floris (2010). How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough. Amsterdam University Press.
Pigliucci, Massimo (2013). “The Demarcation Problem. A (Belated) Response to Laudan”. In Pigliucci & Boundry (eds.) Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University Of Chicago Press. 9-28.