So you're thinking, "April 1st... isn't that already supposed to be April Fool's Day?"

Yes—and that will provide the ideal cover for celebrating Amazing Breakthrough Day.

As I argued in "The Beauty of Settled Science", it is a major problem that media coverage of science focuses only on breaking news.  Breaking news, in science, occurs at the furthest fringes of the scientific frontier, which means that the new discovery is often:

• Controversial
• Supported by only one experiment
• Way the heck more complicated than an ordinary mortal can handle, and requiring lots of prerequisite science to understand, which is why it wasn't solved three centuries ago
• Later shown to be wrong

People never get to see the solid stuff, let alone the understandable stuff, because it isn't breaking news.

On Amazing Breakthrough Day, I propose, journalists who really care about science can report—under the protective cover of April 1st—such important but neglected science stories as:

• BOATS EXPLAINED:  Centuries-Old Problem Solved By Bathtub Nudist
• YOU SHALL NOT CROSS!  Königsberg Tourists' Hopes Dashed
• ARE YOUR LUNGS ON FIRE?  Link Between Respiration And Combustion Gains Acceptance Among Scientists

Facts do not need to be unexplainable, to be beautiful; truths do not become less worth learning, if someone else knows them; beliefs do not become less worthwhile, if many others share them…

…and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention.

Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun.

Oh, sure, you can have the fun of picking a side in an argument. But you can get that in any football game. That’s not what the fun of science is about.

Reading a well-written textbook, you get: Carefully phrased explanations for incoming students, math derived step by step (where applicable), plenty of experiments cited as illustration (where applicable), test problems on which to display your new mastery, and a reasonably good guarantee that what you’re learning is actually true.

Reading press releases, you usually get: Fake explanations that convey nothing except the delusion of understanding of a result that the press release author didn’t understand and that probably has a better-than-even chance of failing to replicate.

Modern science is built on discoveries, built on discoveries, built on discoveries, and so on, all the way back to people like Archimedes, who discovered facts like why boats float, that can make sense even if you don’t know about other discoveries. A good place to start traveling that road is at the beginning.

Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty.

And thinking you can jump right into the frontier, when you haven’t learned the settled science, is like…

…like trying to climb only the top half of Mount Everest (which is the only part that interests you) by standing at the base of the mountain, bending your knees, and jumping really hard (so you can pass over the boring parts).

Now I’m not saying that you should never pay attention to scientific controversies. If 40% of oncologists think that white socks cause cancer, and the other 60% violently disagree, this is an important fact to know.

Just don’t go thinking that science has to be controversial to be interesting.

Or, for that matter, that science has to be recent to be interesting. A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.

Part of the Joy in the Merely Real subsequence of Reductionism

Next post: "Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st"

Previous post: "Mundane Magic"

Some of the comments in this blog have touched on the question of why we ought to seek truth.  (Thankfully not many have questioned what truth is.)  Our shaping motivation for configuring our thoughts to rationality, which determines whether a given configuration is "good" or "bad", comes from whyever we wanted to find truth in the first place.

It is written:  "The first virtue is curiosity."  Curiosity is one reason to seek truth, and it may not be the only one, but it has a special and admirable purity.  If your motive is curiosity, you will assign priority to questions according to how the questions, themselves, tickle your personal aesthetic sense.  A trickier challenge, with a greater probability of failure, may be worth more effort than a simpler one, just because it is more fun.

The classic criticism of the lottery is that the people who play are the ones who can least afford to lose; that the lottery is a sink of money, draining wealth from those who most need it.  Some lottery advocates, and even some commentors on this blog, have tried to defend lottery-ticket buying as a rational purchase of fantasy—paying a dollar for a day's worth of pleasant anticipation, imagining yourself as a millionaire.

But consider exactly what this implies.  It would mean that you're occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero—a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize.  The lottery balls will decide your future.  The fantasy is of wealth that arrives without effort—without conscientiousness, learning, charisma, or even patience.

Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy.  It encourages people to invest their dreams, their hopes for a better future, into an infinitesimal probability.  If not for the lottery, maybe they would fantasize about going to technical school, or opening their own business, or getting a promotion at work—things they might be able to actually do, hopes that would make them want to become stronger.  Their dreaming brains might, in the 20th visualization of the pleasant fantasy, notice a way to really do it.  Isn't that what dreams and brains are for?  But how can such reality-limited fare compete with the artificially sweetened prospect of instant wealth—not after herding a dot-com startup through to IPO, but on Tuesday?

Followup to:  Joy in the Merely Real

So perhaps you're reading all this, and asking:  "Yes, but what does this have to do with reductionism?"

Partially, it's a matter of leaving a line of retreat.  It's not easy to take something important apart into components, when you're convinced that this removes magic from the world, unweaves the rainbow.  I do plan to take certain things apart, on this blog; and I prefer not to create pointless existential anguish.

Partially, it's the crusade against Hollywood Rationality, the concept that understanding the rainbow subtracts its beauty.  The rainbow is still beautiful plus you get the beauty of physics.

But even more deeply, it's one of these subtle hidden-core-of-rationality things.  You know, the sort of thing where I start talking about 'the Way'.  It's about binding yourself to reality.

In one of Frank Herbert's Dune books, IIRC, it is said that a Truthsayer gains their ability to detect lies in others by always speaking truth themselves, so that they form a relationship with the truth whose violation they can feel.  It wouldn't work, but I still think it's one of the more beautiful thoughts in fiction.  At the very least, to get close to the truth, you have to be willing to press yourself up against reality as tightly as possible, without flinching away, or sneering down.

Followup to:  Joy in the Merely Real

"Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and the most fortunate; for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."
        —Lagrange

I have more fun discovering things for myself than reading about them in textbooks.  This is right and proper, and only to be expected.

But discovering something that no one else knows—being the first to unravel the secret—

There is a story that one of the first men to realize that stars were burning by fusion—plausible attributions I've seen are to Fritz Houtermans and Hans Bethe—was walking out with his girlfriend of a night, and she made a comment on how beautiful the stars were, and he replied:  "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows why they shine."

It is attested by numerous sources that this experience, being the first person to solve a major mystery, is a tremendous high.  It's probably the closest experience you can get to taking drugs, without taking drugs—though I wouldn't know.

That can't be healthy.

Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

• If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.
• In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres.  Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together.  If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.
• Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.

You'd think I was crazy, right?

Now suppose it were the year 1901, and you had to choose between believing those statements I have just offered, and believing statements like the following:

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away 

                    ...Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
        —John Keats, Lamia

"Nothing is 'mere'."
        —Richard Feynman 

You've got to admire that phrase, "dull catalogue of common things".  What is it, exactly, that goes in this catalogue?  Besides rainbows, that is?

Why, things that are mundane, of course.  Things that are normal; things that are unmagical; things that are known, or knowable; things that play by the rules (or that play by any rules, which makes them boring); things that are part of the ordinary universe; things that are, in a word, real.

Now that's what I call setting yourself up for a fall.

At that rate, sooner or later you're going to be disappointed in everything—either it will turn out not to exist, or even worse, it will turn out to be real.

If we cannot take joy in things that are merely real, our lives will always be empty.

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away

    "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms.  Nothing is "mere".  I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.  But do I see less or more?
    "The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light.  A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there.  Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.  What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why?  It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
    "For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!  Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?
    "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
            —Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol I, p. 3-6 (line breaks added)

That's a real question, there on the last line—what kind of poet can write about Jupiter the god, but not Jupiter the immense sphere?  Whether or not Feynman meant the question rhetorically, it has a real answer:

If Jupiter is like us, he can fall in love, and lose love, and regain love.
If Jupiter is like us, he can strive, and rise, and be cast down.
If Jupiter is like us, he can laugh or weep or dance.

If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, it is more difficult for the poet to make us feel.

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Fake Explanation

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
        —John Keats, Lamia  

I am guessing—though it is only a guess—that Keats himself did not know the woof and texture of the rainbow.  Not the way that Newton understood rainbows.  Perhaps not even at all.  Maybe Keats just read, somewhere, that Newton had explained the rainbow as "light reflected from raindrops"—

—which was actually known in the 13th century.  Newton only added a refinement by showing that the light was decomposed into colored parts, rather than transformed in color.  But that put rainbows back in the news headlines.  And so Keats, with Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth and Benjamin Haydon, drank "Confusion to the memory of Newton" because "he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." That's one reason to suspect Keats didn't understand the subject too deeply.

I am guessing, though it is only a guess, that Keats could not have sketched out on paper why rainbows only appear when the Sun is behind your head, or why the rainbow is an arc of a circle.