According to the Oz, Queensland LNP Senator Matt Canavan has called for public funding for research promoting his belief that scientists since Arrhenius have been wrong about climate change. He makes this claim on the basis that the overwhelming body of evidence amassed by mainstream science means that “only one side of the debate is heard” (there’s also something about witches). Oddly enough, Canavan goes on to cite some (presumably publicly funded) research on aerosols from the Max Planck Institute which he thinks supports his arguments. The fact that such research gets undertaken and published suggests that there is no problem with the scientific process as regards climate change.
Still, there’s an interesting question here. To what extent should research funding seek to promote research approaches that are regarded by most experts in the relevant field as wrong or discredited?
In fields like economics, the ebb and flow of opinion is such that any temporary appearance of consensus is illusory. When I started studying economics, the dominant Keynesian/market failure school regarded classical economics as a collection of exploded fallacies. Within a decade or so, the position had reversed. Free market microeconomics and New Classical microeconomics became dominant and remained so until the Global Financial Crisis. The position now is best described as confused. Something similar could be said of fields like psychology (another example where plenty of non-specialists have strongly held views)
In the natural sciences, there are a lot more firmly established conclusions, which nonetheless run against the prejudices of many (obviously including Senator Canavan). I don’t see any merit in funding the pet theories and tribal prejudices of politicians. But at the frontiers, there are lots of instances where some particular approach (such as string theory in particle physics) seem to be dominant, at least in part, for sociological reasons. Here it would be desirable to ensure that alternative approaches get a hearing.
Any thoughts?
John Quiggin 
Prof John
Reducing your enquiry to the question of how research should be funded, I suggest several fundamental principles:
1. The process by which useful ideas arise is too erratic and unpredictable to be entirely amenable to rational sieving criteria. The best way to advance knowledge is to nourish the people who are capable of new ideas and allow their imagination to take knowledge where they will. However, public funding requires some rational sieving criteria.
Politics is not the forum to fund investigating research; and yes, disciplines get taken over by disserviceable enthusiasms from time to time that can best be broken down by funding researchers to do non-mainstream work.
This is perhaps more of a risk in the social sciences because humans learn from experience.
2. Obliging researchers to spend half their time chasing funds to survive; and obliging researchers to partner with industry so that their research can be channelled to practical outcomes, are two sopping wet blankets upon creation of new knowledge, whether mainstream or outside mainstream.
3. So the primary research institutions (universities, CSIRO, CRCs) should have base research funding that is long-term stable and sufficiently comfortable to cover basic maintenance and capital renewal costs as well as giving a core cohort of researchers secure tenure.
This should allow curiosity-led research and pure research, and should allow researchers with non-mainstream ideas to find a niche (so long as they have sufficient scholarly skill and can demonstrate results from time to time).
4. Researchers should then be able to bid for project funding from ARC for special projects, capital and recurrent, where they can justify that a line of enquiry will require particular extra resources. Necessarily, any such system is going to have an eye to practical results so this is always going to be less suitable for pure or basic research.
5. The ARC must have stable funding and reasonably generous funding allocated at least twice a year. Researchers should have at least a 30% prospect of success, a ratio which should weed out the inadequate applications.
The ARC must be non-political and multidisciplinary. Further, the ministerial department in which the ARC is housed must be cleansed of the managerialist mindset that sees only business-friendly research or research with demonstrable short-term outputs as being worthwhile.
PS
By “results” In item 3 I meant “outputs” – results may not be measurable for decades.
Fab. A new mutation of the climate denial meme virus. Its not dead! Told you so John. But seriously thanks for the Xmas laugh.
This story reminds me of PM Turnbull’s largesse toward that Rainmaking company with its secret Russian technology located at the outpost of Queensland Byron Bay. UQ didnt question that humbug but took the money to do the review rather than bursting out laughing. Then there was Jo’s water powered car. I might have suspected there was something in the water there (or not in the case of Fluoride) except that other great scam Firepower with its defiance of thermodynamics was more a Sydney scam. Now all we need is the Lavoisier Society to get mixed up which seems appropriate.
It never ceases to amaze me how the physics gets compartmentatized. On one hand fossil fuel usage is utterly grounded in the theory of thermodynamics and heat exchange and the deniers are perfectly comfortable with the science in this instance – indeed they profit from it. But then exactly the same theory and methods and number crunching are applied to another system revealing some inconvenient truths and they try and adjust the science to fit their world view instead.
What is the explanation? All this I suggest is delightfully post modern so they must be followers of Foucault…..which has been interpreted as saying all perspectives are of equal value…which is not scientific but is very democratic
On subsidiary musing 1.
Maybe, but when I read Steve Keens recent story of economists with real power
itt supported my concern that among those who determine economic policy there is much denialism still .
On subsidiary musing 2.
The blogosphere is indeed somewhere you can find any view you wish with contentions supported or rejected in the best bush lawyer style. However there are important exceptions. Said non-specialists may in fact be specialists in another discipline/ideology/science. One reason specialist academics such as economists get a lot of flak is that their musings, theories etc. make claims, (or at least they have to reduce their arguments to), conclusions or assertions which are to other well established and credible disciplines, to be plain wrong. A classic example here is the idea that we can have infinite economic growth. Another intersection was the dispute between chemists who saw no problems with pesticides v. ecologists who specialized in studying the effects but were generally not specialist chemists. The latter conflicts are amenable to resolution provides people remain civilized.
A more difficult problem arises between “applied” specialists v. chatterers especially when the former are embedded in government or business. The latter environments have a way of conflicting specialists to the point where they sell out, take a narrow view or self censor.
Because of this I am personally wary of depracating the ‘non-specialists’ I encounter as too often they see the emperor has no clothes and his specialist advisors have serious problems clearer than I do.
It’s remarkable how little faith these roosters have in the market and the private sector when their pet causes are in trouble. The good senator should know that any avenue of research that promised to debunk mainstream climate change theory would have already had millions of dollars thrown at it by the fossil fuel industry.
As far as the general question is concerned, it’s quite misconceived to talk of research intended to “promote” one finding or another. It’s not the function of research to promote anything at all. If climate change research is grounded in flawed theory, that will become obvious over time when data doesn’t match the predictions of theory (as indeed has already happened, resulting in modifications to the theory).
What Canavan really wants is for public money to be spent on the kind of “analysis” already engaged in by the IPA and the Heartland Institute, to keep the denialist movement on life support for another year or three.
@Geoff Edwards
Any comments on the Canadian model where I believe much less money is waste on grant swinging and administration. I understand each academic gets a significant base stipend which is sufficient for free inquiry as against our system which is oriented to recycling the beliefs of dominant players and established interests.
What IS wrong with QLD?
And we do have an organisation that funds and promotes a contrarian take on AGW. Its called News Limited.
@Newtownian
Sorry, Newtonian. I don’t know enough about the comparative arrangements in different countries to answer your question. However, I can’t imagine that any developed country sitting within the Enlightenment tradition could fund scientific research as badly or inefficiently as Australia does.
We’ve only heard one side of the debate that gravity makes things fall. What about the other side of the debate, where gravity makes things fly? Look at birds, they fly. Why aren’t scientists studying this? They tell us gravity makes things fall, but look, planes, birds, superman: why are they fudging the figures? What are they hiding?
Meanwhile, in the reality based world, 2015 has smashed the previous record for the increase in global average temperature anomaly, giving us the hottest year of the instrumental record. The Met Office in the UK are predicting that 2016 is going to be substantially hotter than 2015, with only a 5% probability of being cooler than 2015. Place yer bets. In the Met Office’s words:
The time for being polite about the arrant nonsense coming from our political “representatives” is over.
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I think one of the key confusions in the noggin of the senator is a conflating of searching for evidence to back your pre-conceived position with searching for answers to the question of what happens. Scientific research is aimed at discovery of the how and why of things; scientists, at an individual level, may have strong views as to what they think the answers might be, but in the end the evidence found is what it is, and it trumps individual opinion. In the political arena, the more cognitively challenged of our elected officials think that the only evidence of note is that which supports their beliefs/prior position on something, and they dismiss anything that might counter the narrative they are running.
There are some excellent books on critical thinking. Perhaps we should band together and purchase a few to send to elected officials who have demonstrated a clear need of such a book; it would make a nice Xmas gift for them. Perhaps we could bundle it with a “Where’s Wally” book as well.
The NSW government uses public funding to insure economic rent-seeking (in the form of taxi licences), so why shouldn’t there be public funding for all sorts of interests?
I came across this the other dayHow to become a GOOD Theoretical Physicist by Nobel Laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft, in which he says
I think this may be applicable to Matt Canavan.
Hmm. It seems you’ve actually set two separate questions to be answered, ProfQ.
1. How to fund “science” (whatever it is we mean by “science”) to maximize the ‘new and different’ knowledge we unleash upon our species.
2. What to do about the Canavans of our species.
Now question 1 has very different aspects depending on whether we are talking ‘pure’ or ‘applied’ science. There is, after all, nothing particularly ‘applicable’ about String Theory – it will probably (unlike Quantum Physics) never lead us to a better computer. But then again, how would I know ?
As to question 2, if we knew what to do about Canavan, we might know what to do about all the other ‘radicalised’ human beings – including Abbott, Turnbull and Shorten inter alia.
But I guess all we can do is continue to educate as many people as we can as far as they can go and then hope for the best. Or do you think somebody will eventually come up with a recipe to solve both questions ?
An extract from Mathew Canavan’s bio on his website.
‘Matthew grew up in Logan just south of Brisbane. After achieving a First Class Honours Degree in Economics at the University of Queensland, Matthew worked at the Productivity Commission where he eventually rose to the level of Director.
During that time Matthew worked on projects ranging from competition laws, housing affordability to counting the number of policies that Australian governments have introduced to tackle climate change (the answer was 244).
Becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of coherent economic policy by the Rudd Government, Matthew went to work for Barnaby Joyce as his Chief-of-Staff ahead of the 2010 election’.
Senator Canavan spoke at an Endeavour Forum meeting with Senator Joe Bullock recently. Bird brains of a feather flock together!
‘Senator Matt Canavan has spoken and written about this inequality – and called for ‘Family based taxation’ to be introduced. ..
Senator Canavan will be one of the Guest Speakers at a public meeting held by Endeavour Forum on Saturday 15 August.
Endeavour Forum meeting: “Taxation Justice for Families”
Speakers: Senator Matthew Canavan (LNP-Qld) and Senator Joseph Bullock (ALP-WA)
Date and time: Saturday 15 August, 2.30 pm’.
‘Welcome to Endeavour Forum Inc.
Our organisation is a Christian, pro-life, pro-family Australian Non-Government Organisation (NGO) which has special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations. We were founded to counter feminism, to defend the right to life of the unborn, and to support marriage and the natural family. We have links with similar organisations both local and overseas’.
Contrarian ideas deserve more consideration when there are observations that don’t fit into the prevailing paradigm without kludges.
Dear Senator Canavan
Sorry to pile on. it was immediately possible to find a purported statement of the author of the study on aerosols, Bjorn Stevens, who expressly rejects the interpretation quoted by you.
When science rejects your world view, it must be wrong. I agree. However, I am at a loss to reject the science of Joseph Fourier, whose logic from this distance in time still seems impeccable. Surely, when the sun stops shinning, you might expect the temperature to fall precipitously if there was no intervening means to retain heat (as apparently is the case on other planets). Admittedly his experimental apparatus for the study of heat flows was not flash. About fifty to sixty years later, John Tyndale identified how some familiar atmospheric gases, such water vapour, operate as a atmospheric “semi-permeable membrane”, effected by the differences in wavelengths of radiated and reflected energy. Now that Tyndale apparatus was awesome. It seems that Arrhenius was pretty much on the money (a market metaphor, I am sure you appreciate), but it took some time for that to be realized.
It is a remaining mystery as to how water gets into the sky, stay there, and then fall as rain (but that might be a whole other story). I note in passing the Sky Father became very angry recently at Kurnell, so it is nice to have the Earth Mother to turn to for solace.
What has shocked me, and I find highly suspicious – I am calling conspiracy – is the statistical study that found 114 climate models have accurately predicted the temperatures during the 21st Century.
Since this should not be happening: it cannot be happening. If we look diligently we must be able to find one climate-related variable that will call into question the whole construct and disprove this state of affairs. I am thinking animal migrations, including the flight paths of birds. What is your research proposal?
Keep the faith Senator
“Oddly enough, Canavan goes on to cite some (presumably publicly funded) research on aerosols from the Max Planck Institute which he thinks supports his arguments.”
Unsurprisingly, the author of the work begs to differ:
“In my new paper I did not speculate as to the implications of my findings for estimates of Earth’s Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, which is perhaps the simplest measure of the response of the Earth System to a change in concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However others have used my findings to suggest that Earth’s surface temperatures are rather insensitive to the concentration of atmospheric CO2. I do not believe that my work supports these suggestions, or inferences.
“As fond as I am of my own ideas, one should resist concluding too much, too soon, from a single study. In the long run I certainly hope that my findings will help constrain the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 but they do not, on their own, relieve society of the threat of dangerous warming arising from anthropogenic emissions of CO2. Indeed, even a warming of only 2ºC from a doubling of CO2 poses considerable risks for society. Many scientists (myself included) believe that a warming of more than 2ºC from a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is consistent with both my new study and our best understanding.”
Click to access AerosolForcing-Statement-BjornStevens.pdf
So you can see why Canavan is still not satisfied.
When Canavan writes “We need red team funding of scientists who take a different view on climate change”, he clearly means we should give special funding to researchers who think there is low (ideally zero) climate sensitivity to CO2. Somebody truly worried about groupthink amongst climate scientists would of course be interested in ensuring that fringe positions on both the low and high sides weren’t frozen out.
There can be good reasons for funding research in ‘dissenting’ ways but it seems to me that one needs at least a small problem with existing theory before this makes sense.
No expert in any theory mentioned below>
The current theory of continental drift – plate tectonics seems an example. Earlier theories seems to have so many land bridges that they were becoming ridiculous. The helio-centric theory evolved to handle known problems with earlier theories. Germ theory handled various problems better than whatever. (Spontaneous something or other? Or am I thinking of witches? )
As far as I can see a) climate change does not show these problems, and perhaps more importantly climate change is not one science. Some rather nasty problems in several areas of scientific research from basic chemistry to paleontology would have to occur. Not impossible but I’d not bet on it.
Canavan’s “only one side of the debate is heard” argument sounds a lot like the American religious fundamentalists “teach the controversy” argument against evolutin; in both cases there is no other side or controversy.
Mandelbrot;
I guess the problem is how do we encourage people who challenge the main stream or dominant theories without giving sustenance to the likes of Canavan. There are often examples in the natural sciences where a seemingly outlandish theory has eventually been shown to explain a phenonemom yet initially Was regarded by the leading scientists of the day as absurd.
For example, the link between Helicobacter Pylori and stomach ulcers was rejected time and time again despite strong evidence. I am unsure if Marshall and Warren’s research was publicly funded but I seem to recall that they had difficulty funding their research and then after firmly establishing the correctness of their theory they had great difficulty getting it published by the scientif journals. Their peers were very slow to acknowledge that the theory had been demonstrated and even slower adopting the suggested treatment.
I am sure that any ‘sieving’ procedure in the hands of the leading scientists of the time would not have supported Marshall and Warren’s research.
John
I suspect that the current enthusiasm for ERA rankings is regressive in this respect. The mainstream journals are more likely to publish mainstream stuff, or expressed in other words, are so inundated with mainstream stuff that they don’t need to select maverick stuff to publish. Unusual results are more likely to get a run in a less conspicuous journal. So long as this is peer-reviewed faithfully and is indexed, it should then come into attention and attract momentum.
As I understand the situation now, academics are under significant pressure to go for the top journals first. I can’t imagine how this elitist approach necessarily tracks good scholarship.
@John Turner
An excellent example. However, in general, if people do not base themselves on “strong evidence” w.r.t. more potent issues such as crisis tendencies within capitalism or greenhouse gasses, then catastrophe looms.
Instead of adhering to evidence, some institutionalised academics seem very partial to a lot of theoretical hand-waving and reveling in what can only be viewed as unreasonable doubts. Windschuttle is the classic example of the latter.
Kenyesian capitalism is built on unreasonable beliefs and hand-waving.
J.Q. has outlined a “wicked problem” for which there is no precise solution. We will continue to bumble along.
In the hard sciences at least, one would think that research proposals would be based on accepting well-established basic science. Thus a proposal to do climate modelling by rejecting the established laws of thermodynamics would not get funding. Proposals to re-research the laws of thermodynamics in whatever manner would have to be evaluated on their (probably unlikely) merits by the “gatekeepers”.
With the soft sciences, we keep discovering that we cannot make much progress. There may be no way to avoid intellectual fashions in this arena. So failed research programs that last as long as a generation or two of academics are quite possible; indeed they seem to have been the norm.
Our faith in deterministic science and inevitable progress is much shaken since the Victorian Era. The “laws of the universe” turn out to be indeterminate and probabilistic rather than determinate. Ontologically, there are no explanations for anything. There are no reasons, no causes which we can detect. There are observable laws as probability distributions. Laws, even those which permit good predictions, are not strictly equatable to causes. As an every day shorthand we talk about causes and the concept is useful at that level but strictly speaking “cause” is an unprovable metaphysical assumption.
In my opinion, economics would benefit from being divided into two arenas namely thermoeconomics and social-economics. The latter would include agent theory, game theory,institutional economics and political economy in order of ascending importance; political economy being the most important. There is a need to first study these two arenas in a segregated fashion and then attempt to link them by a complex system theory which sought to integrate an understanding of how real systems and formal systems interact. The interaction would need to be understood via information theory among other factors.
Given the amount of money spent in the US by climate deniers it is ludicrous to spend more money on this question. Now, of course if the Senator wanted to spend money arguing that the earth is flat. well…
Apart from the innovation opportunities for tax lawyers and accountants I see little merit in the PM’s innovation push. There are lots of ways of using current techniques to evaluate investment proposals but the results are ignored, e.g. the East West link proposed by the Napthine Government (benefit/cost ratio of 0.3!). By the way. how is the NBN going? An extra $15 billion when Turnbull was the minister and f*** all to show for it. What we have done wrong to get such leaders?
Part of the answer is researchers do a lot more than they officially get funded to do. It is their risk management strategy – they do a lot underground. Note they are thankfully not required to fill out time sheets every 6 minutes. They get to spend a lot of useful time looking out the window . I actually knew one prominent researcher who was always a project ahead – in other words the researcher only put up a project where enough had already been done to know it was a winner. All this partly explains why researchers don’t seem to have enough failures – as Woody Allan commented on that KPI, it means they are not trying hard enough! The system rewards success so failures stay underground and unpublished. Canavan would not know how fiercely competitive researchers are within their discipline although they may be united in public on some key findings. As premier Jo might have said, if Senator Canavan has the answer it must have been a funny question!
As I understand it, in science the funding of research is not whimsical or accidental. There is body that plans the areas of science where more knowledge is needed and the available funds are shared in a rational manner. Canavan’s proposal would need to be processed by the scientific regulatory community.
The other path is to appeal to whatever bunch of idiots it was that assigned hundreds of millions of dollars to CCS “research”. Peter Beaty might be able to help him find such people. Am I right in recalling that PB handed 500 million to the coal producers for CCS research before quitting politics? Canavan could ask them for some of yhat money back for his shonkey research interest.
Love your heading, JQ.
As for economics, it is not a science, not a natural science in any case. The shifting consensus and the confusion, which you say exists now, is, I believe, a description of the policy arm of economics.
For quite a long time now, from the mid-1980s onward I’d say, there has been external and internal pressure at local universities to produce ‘relevant’ research in economics and it should be empirical. This research policy has, in my opinion, allowed the shifting of consensus in the policy arm of economics. The young researchers (relative to my age) were encouraged to acquire training in methods, empirical methods, without being encouraged to study the theoretical conditions under which these methods make any sense. They were kept busy. Examples: The Fama-Fisher-Jensen efficient market hypothesis; Baumol’s contestable markets (privatisation, new public sector management); M Friedman’s his belief in ‘Walrasian system’ and monetarism; Modigliani’s life-cycle hypotheis (private insurance); Samuelson’s revealed preference (eg hedonic pricing).
Methods can be learned without understanding – one does what had been done before, except using a different data sample. Surely you know of a lot of papers of this kind. Usually they involve a long list of references and a long section on possible explanations as to why the numbers come out a bit different. To get into this literature is, in my experience, a rather risky venture because there is the danger of forgetting the original research question due to growth in uncertainty about what is going on – being unable to see the forest because of the trees.
I am not sure the Global Financial Crisis has been sufficient to turn to boat around. I finished my submission in response the Environmental Impact Statement for the Western Sydney Airport. Ernst & Young had been hired to do an economic analysis. They used a computable general equilibrium model and several submodels, the output of which entered as input into the CGE model. EY were clearly not aware that their model makes sense if and only if ‘the market is complete’. But much of the EIS is concerned with negative externalities. If nothing convinces you of my arguments in the foregoing paragraph, surely this one will.
In the arena of welfare policy (as opposed to welfare research), I noticed that funding formulas gave the answer required. That is to say, the administrators knew the allowable spend and jigged variables to get that answer. This is probably a trivial and obvious observation. At the same time, this general approach “bleeds backwards” into the area of justification for all projects public or private.
I assume with the Western Sydney Airport, the answer desired by corporate money is “the airport must be built”. I would then assume that the corporate and official pro-corporate formulas, equations, reports and models are in turn designed to give this answer. Or else they take that answer as virtually given and as many likely opposing factors as possible (existence or not of complete markets, negative externalities etc. are ruled to be outside the ambit of the assessment process.
Interesting. Don’t the curent investigations as to dark matter tend to confirm in some way the Phlogiston theory.
Just sayin’..
Then there is this considerstion…
http://www.skepticalscience.com/why-climate-contrarians-are-wrong.html
@James Wimberley
I agree and I would have thought that our scientists had enough integrity to actually report data that totally contradicted CC that has been recorded as accelerating for decades.
@James Wimberley
Well maybe, James, maybe. But then any half-way decent theory always has its grey areas. That’s why scientists spend so much time and money articulating their paradigms.
But the main issue, of course, is which contrarian ideas ? So, if there are still unresolved aspects of evolution theory, does that mean that “Intelligent Design” should get government funding ?
Coca Cola felt that their product has been unfairly treated so they hired their own science and scientists
Good find, Rog. How long will it be before we can drink “Clean Coke” as we stoke our stoves with “Clean Coal” to cook our “Safe GM food” while listening to Donald Trump’s innauguraton speech. The world is safe in corpirate hands.
Progress in the natural sciences is, I believe, much more based on what’s gone on before than in economics or psychology, there is much less of a firm basis on which new research is undertaken.
For example, would I be correct in saying that the frequency of revolutionary change in economics and psychology is much more frequent than natural sciences? And even when revolutionary changes occur there, for example Einstien’s Theory of Relativity, it’s usually a ‘great leap forward’ rather than a destruction of thoughts held to be correct previously.
I would place mathematics in the same category as economics (sorry, I am much more familiar with natural sciences, and mathematics seems to me to be a most ‘unnatural’ science, but it is closely linked with physics and chemistry). Sometimes new mathematical theories come along that completely debunk the existing understanding, moving it sideways and forward; but from my experience and knowledge, this happens to nowhere near the same extent in chemistry, for example, where new findings tend to move knowledge upwards and forwards.
Sorry I should have added: in economics it is valid to try and move sideways to revolutionise the theory, but in climate change, to move sideways would require an entire new paradigm, and we don’t have time for that.
I guess we also see the results and benefits of existing research into the natural sciences much more quickly and definably, therefore we tend to build on that rather than knock it down.
Wind farms are an interesting point: do we consider further delving into the ‘possible’ adverse health effects of wind farms, or do we spend our money on more research into harnessing the power of wind? Given the likelihood that we will ever find the leprechaun that causes wind turbine syndrome, I think it’s a better bet to fund wind power.
Mercurial
1. Mathematics is a science (the most fundamental one), because it adheres to scientific method (testable hypotheses, reproducibility, high explanatory and predictive power).
2. Economics is not a science because its basic assumptions are not considered to be falsifiable. Try to convince an orthodox economist that humans are not rational self-interested beings whose behaviour can be aggregated upwards to explain society. Yet if humans are not rational self-interested beings but beings with erratic judgement and both self-interested and civic dimensions, then a large body of economics collapses.
3. Because humans learn from and change their behaviour, strong predictability is probably not possible in economics. The mistake is not in failure to predict, but in assuming that economic models can indeed predict.
4. Because the foundation is insufficiently robust to deliver strong explanatory and predictive power, economics is subject to enthusiasms and fragmentation. Individuals’ enthusiasms in the real sciences do not disturb the core foundation and are based on specialisation rather than arguments about the core. Prof John can correct me if I’m wrong in this.
5. The term “natural sciences” is a loose one used to differentiate the biological sciences from the physical sciences such as mathematics, physics and chemistry.
6. Yes, in the true sciences revolutionary advances such as relativity tend to reveal that previous orthodoxy (in that case Newtonian mechanics) was a subset or special case of the new explanation rather than being false. Mathematics belongs with the other true sciences in this feature.
6. Climate science is not a single science but a cluster of branches of science with different methods and different foundations. This lends considerable robustness and a vanishing likelihood that the core consensus conclusions will be invalidated.
7. Your question about wind farms is partly a political one. For reasons of sound public policy, research both into the side effects and into improving their efficiency is required. It is entirely appropriate for governments to fund research aimed at answering specific policy questions. However, referring back to Prof John’s question, there also needs to be adequate, secure funding for research that has no such necessary short-term practical outcome so that innovation can proceed at the margins and orthodoxy can be questioned by blue sky thinkers in their niches.
Afterthought Mercurial:
Where science does fall down and branches of science produce disserviceable conclusions, the reason is often reductionism, or concentration on narrow specialties. Specialists who are unaware of knowledge in other disciplines can produce conclusions that are not universally correct or that don’t support practical application.
For example, specialists trained in pharmacology can ignore evidence from herbal or vitamin therapy. Geologists with a geologically extended time frame of reference can ignore evidence from contemporary climatologists. Gene technologists can ignore evidence from ecologists of the risks of genetic modification to the environment. These unintended consequences do not invalidate the basic findings of the specialists. They warn against accepting enthusiasms in the sciences just as in any other body of knowledge.
THanks Geoff. Re your 1, I guess I was referring to the fact that mathematical equations sometimes seem to be removed from the natural world. This is, of course, an illusion.
And thank you for your lucid clarifications.
@Geoff Edwards
I guess applied maths is the science of quantity and equation. There are other types of maths which form internally consistent but empirically impossible systems. I don’t see how that part of maths could be called an empirical science. Maths and the real world do have an interface but that does not exhaust maths or the real world. But these are amateur guesses on my part.
What about the ‘sceptics’ who deny axiomatic mathematics? Non-Euclidean geometry does have its applications, no?
I seem to remember ‘i’ from my high school Level 1 maths, all those years ago.
Dear Mercurial
There are relativists who deny the reality of science, claiming that nothing is objective. Knowledge that relies upon mathematics rather than language-based narrative should be immune to this type of fundamental criticism, but isn’t entirely. Personally I don’t think that relativism carried to this degree is a fruitful field of enquiry. If you hold that nothing is absolute, then there is no basis on which to take steps to improve society. If you don’t accept fundamentals such as the first and second laws of thermodynamics, then you have no foundations for any systematic knowledge and your thinking is reduced to personal speculation.
I hold that mainstream economics is a particularly pernicious manifestation of relativism. With the self-interested individual at its core, the discipline is self-referential and dismissive of the system-wide attributes of a society. John Howard famously denigrated post-modernists who don’t believe in anything; and the modern commentators in the Murdoch press who rail against “leftist elites” lie in this tradition. But those who place their faith in the anonymous, individualistic, materialistic market are the worst postmodern relativists of all.
@Mercurial
Before you get too thankful to Ernestine, Mercurial, perhaps you should be aware of the errors in his exposition.
The first one being “mathematics as a science”. Let’s be clear about this, mathematics is only peripherally connected with the universe, there are no circles or straight lines in the real actual universe. Our geometries, whether Euclidean or otherwise are merely convenient approximations that, sometimes anyway, allow us to represent the regularities of what we think we observe.
For instance, the geometry of multiple dimensions tells us that knots are impossible in spaces of 4 or more physical dimensions (ie not including temporal dimensions). How exactly could we subject that “prediction” of mathematics to empirical test ?
Many of the theories of economics are actually scientific and are coming under increasing empirical verification (or falsification as the case may be). However, economics is just a little bit like archaeology: we can’t often, if at all, run laboratory tests. Economists can’t just start up a recession on demand to examine how it works (other than Volker and his conquest of American inflation, of course). All we can do is observe what has happened and try to work out the how and the why.
Prediction in economics is, though, a very interesting aspect and I tend to agree with Ernestine as to its precarious nature. But we shall see. If enough people are involved in an economic activity, then many differences can be ‘averaged out’ over the whole behavioral aspect.
But yes, again agreeing with Ernestine, ideology is rampant in economic “theories”, in part at least because of the non-laboratory property of the field. But also because human beings love to believe what they love to believe. Taking archaeology for instance, how many didn’t believe in continental drift ? Until, that is, the irrefutable observation of plate tectonics put the matter beyond dispute. But nobody could put a bunch of continents into an earth-like planet in the laboratory to see if they drifted.
The term “natural sciences” as anybody prepared to spend a moment looking up a dictionary will find actually means: “a branch of science that deals with the physical world, e.g., physics, chemistry, geology, and biology.” Where Ernestine got his idiosyncratic definition of “natural sciences” I know not.
Revolutions in science actually do completely destroy what they replace: Newtonian physics is not a “subset” of relativity. Just for instance, Newtonian physics requires a fixed Euclidean space and an invariant time (why do you think that the Einsteinian inter-related ‘spacetime’ was such a revolution ?). Newtonian physics also requires an invariant event sequence. Relativity on the other hand requires a Riemann space and shows that the shape of spacetime and the sequence of events is relative to the position, speed and acceleration of the observer (how strange that “Relativity” should require so many relativities). Besides, Newtonian physics is simply observably wrong within our solar system: it miscalculates the orbit of Mercury which requires a relativistic precession because it is acted upon by the massive gravitational force of the sun.
Besides, as Einstein himself had so much trouble accepting, Quantum Physics completely overthrew the classical notion of a ‘deterministic’ universe, forever (maybe 🙂 replacing it with a probabilistic universe.
So I don’t know what Ernestine’s profession is, but I hope it isn’t any form of teacher.
@GrueBleen
GrueBleen
Best to blame me, not Ernestine, for my Newtonian approximation to reality.
Mathematics is a logical construct. While many concepts within mathematics could be framed in different ways, indeed splitting of concepts into smaller chunks (conceptlets?) is a standard trick in the toolkit of a mathematician, there are rules which these concepts must obey—or they are not part of mathematics, whatever else they may be.
1+1 = 2.
1+3 2.
There are rules, however we care to name the objects (i.e. “1” is one and only one; we could have called it “watermelon”, but the concept it represents is still one), the rules determine truth from falsehood. [Unless you do a Kurt Goedel…].
The universe, while inscrutable on some level, does follow some rules. We can observe certain things about the universe, and, since these things follow rules, we can often capture the essential logic as a mathematical construct. If we are fortunate, that construct is simple enough for us to exploit, making predictions about how the universe (or that part we are examining) behaves. The correspondence between things in the universe, and a mathematical representation of these things and their relationships, permits us to use solutions to the mathematical constructs—typically sets of equations and conditions—to make predictions about how real things behave.
If the universe were entirely random in the purest sense of the word, there would be no rules or relationships within it, so nothing at all would be predictable in the first place. Quantum physics embodies stochastic behaviour, but it isn’t without rules: we can still make the observation that of a thousand electrons shot at a target, they scattered according to a probability distribution, a very solid mathematical construct. When I said random, I meant a universe for which there are no rules at all, probabilistic or otherwise. Our very existence depends upon physical laws of nature, chemistry, physics, etc; in a universe without laws (i.e. rules), it’s unlikely there would be humans around and in circumstances conducive to studying such a universe 🙂
@Geoff Edwards
No, Geoff, I took my critique of Newtonian physics directly from Ernestine. I hadn’t even (he confesses shamefacedly) read your post. But I will do so.
Unfortunately the “Newton as a subset of Relativity’ trope is widespread – but not amongst real physicists for it is just so totally wrong. What Newtonian physics is, is a computationally convenient way of calculating certain simple problems, eg the path of a Soyuz to the ISS. But even in quite simple cases – eg satellites orbiting Earth it is inadequate. For instance, the GPS satellites have to have relativistic corrections applied to their timekeeping to get sufficient accuracy – Newtonian physics is grossly mistaken in this circumstance.
@Donald Oats
Quite well put, Mr Oats.
But regarding totally “random” universes, I have always had this desire to ask “Isn’t it just amazing how mathematics applies to the Universe” types (especially Paul Davies) that if it is so amazing how mathematics applies to the universe then they’d have absolutely no difficulty describing for us a universe to which mathematics doesn’t/can’t apply.
However, I do appreciate one of the universal rules of mathematics: that all moderately complex axiom systems are subject to the Goedel Theorem. Which, as far as I can tell, includes (at least analogously) all deontological morality systems.