Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science (Science and Cultural Theory) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822333074 ISBN 13: 9780822333074

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components--nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on--but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward "growing explanations" from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy--based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of computers to simulate such complexity--has played out in a broad array of sciences. They describe how scientists are reordering knowledge to emphasize growth, change, and contingency and, in so doing, are revealing even phenomena long considered elementary--like particles and genes--as emergent properties of dynamic processes.

Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as "What is life?" and "What is an organism?" are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation.

Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M. Norton Wise is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a coauthor of Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin and the editor of The Values of Precision.

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""Growing Explanations" registers the profound shift in many domains of science--from chaos theory to functional genomics--giving epistemological priority to complex and emergent phenomena. Anyone interested in the nature of contemporary science, especially the central role of the computer, will find this a fascinating read."--Angela N. H. Creager, Princeton University

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Growing Explanations

Historical Perspectives on Recent ScienceBy M. Norton Wise

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 M. Norton Wise
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822333074

Chapter One

Mirror symmetry: persons, values, and objects

Peter Galison

At the millennium, there was much talk about "the end of physics." Many physicists believed that their enterprise was coming to a final phase of its history, but they interpreted "the end" in numerous ways. At the end of the cold war some made dire predictions about the discipline because military research and development were downsized, the $15 billion superconducting supercollider was canceled in 1993, the National Science Foundation offered less to physics, and the Department of Energy budget was significantly reallocated. These same words-"the end of physics"-took on a second meaning in the 1980s and 1990s, when some high-energy particle physicists turned against a small but growing minority of theorists who embraced string theory. For these critics string theory appeared a false salvation, a mathematical chimera that abandoned experiment, tempted the young, distorted pedagogy, and ultimately threatened the existence of physics as science. A third meaning of the "end of physics" emerged within string theorists' own ambitions: many argued that a remarkable series of discoveries within the mathematical physics of strings provided grounds, the best ever, for an account of all the known forces including gravity, completing the historical mission of fundamental physics. It would be, its most enthusiastic backers argued, a "theory of everything."

Physics at the millennium

Hopes and fears for finality in physics are not new. Distinctive is the string-theoretical vision in which mathematics itself came to stand where experiment once was: the view that the powerful constraints of mathematical self-consistency would hem theory in so tightly that, at the end, only one theory would stand, and that an elegant, compact theory would cover the world by predicting all the basic forces and masses that constitute and bind matter. Theoretical physics would end, in this third sense, because the ancient search for physical explanation in terms of basic building blocks had reached its last station.

Rejecting the doomsayers, the new alliance between physics and mathematics saw the opportunity to restructure the bounds of both fields, opening a window on twenty-first century mathematics that might, imminently, produce a unified account of gravity and particle physics. But the optimism came with warnings from some quarters of both math and physics-what would be the proper standards of demonstration in this new interzone between disciplines? Would this new "speculative mathematics" sacrifice experiment on the physics side and intrude physical argumentation into the heartland of mathematics on the other? Would it compromise both the physicists' demand for laboratory confirmation and the mathematicians' historical insistence on rigor?

These discussions over the place of string theory are enormously instructive. They over a glimpse into theoretical physics during a remarkable period of transition, for in the realignment of theory toward mathematics the meaning of both theory and theorist were in flux: First, in the 1990s a new category of theorist was coming into being, part mathematician and part physicist. Second, theorists ushered a new set of conceptual objects onto the stage, not exactly physical entities and yet not quite (or not yet) fully mathematical objects, either. Finally, alongside the shift in theorist and theory, there arose, in the trading zone between physics and mathematics, a style of demonstration that did not conform either to older forms of physical argumentation familiar to particle physicists or to canonical proofs recognizable to "pure" mathematicians.

By introducing new categories of persons, objects, and demonstrations, string theory made manifest conflicts over the values that propel and restrict the conduct of research. These debates, joined explicitly by both mathematicians and physicists, focused on the values that ought to guide research, and the disagreements were consequential. At stake were the principles according to which students should be trained, how credit for demonstrations should be partitioned, what research programs ought be funded, and what would count as a demonstration. For all these reasons, the status of claims and counterclaims about string theory mattered. They were not "just rhetoric" constructed after the fact; they were, in part, struggles over the present and future of physics. Values, in the conjoint moral and technical sense I have in mind, were not, as one historian derisively called them, mere "graffiti." Nor is it the case that these values respected a distinction between "inside" and "outside" science. These were not values in the sense of "propriety," such as whether or not honorary authorship would be countenanced on a group paper. Rather, I will argue that the "values" in debate crosscut through the central, guiding commitments of physics and mathematics into the wider, everyday sense of the term. For this reason, dismissing the role of values in shaping theoretical research makes it impossible to understand both the moral passion behind these debates over demonstrative standards, the participants' own understanding of their distinctive scientific cultures, and ultimately, the scientific persona of the physicist.

The argument will follow this order: section two tracks the reaction by particle physicists to the shift by string theorists away from the constant interplay between theory and experiment. Sections three through five home in on the creation during the late 1980s and early 1990s of a striking "trading zone" between physicists and mathematicians around a variety of developments including that of "mirror symmetry," a remarkable development at once physical and mathematical. Mirror symmetry offered insight both into the shape of string theory after the higher dimensions curled up and provided new ways of understanding not only fundamental features of algebraic geometry, but also reshaped the status of geometry itself. By following the ways mathematicians and physicists saw one another in the episode of mirror symmetry-and the ways each side came to understand aspects of the other's theoretical culture-it becomes possible to characterize the broad features of a new place for theory in the world. Finally, in light of the tremendous impact of this hybrid physics-mathematics, section six analyzes the mathematicians' sometimes conflicted reaction: a response mixing enormous enthusiasm with grave reservations about the loss of rigor that accompanied the mathematicians' collaboration with the physicists. In a sense the physicists' and mathematicians' anxieties mirrored one another: both saw danger in parting from historically established modes of demonstrations that gave identity to their fields. These discussions were hard fought and explicit: in the midst of remarkable new results, claims, and critics, string theorists never had the luxury of being unself-conscious: the purpose, standards, and foundation of their budding discipline were always on the table.

At the end of the millennium, string theory resided, both powerfully and precariously, in the hybrid center between fields, bounded on one side by the continent of physics under the flag of experiment and on the other side by the continent of mathematics under the flag of rigor. To understand the aspirations and anxieties of this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822333074
• ISBN 13: 9780822333074
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Herausgeber: Wise M Norton
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar