You want the good research? Find the day-shifter whose still working on it, possibly as late as 11:00 tonight — possibly working on another all-nighter.

Thomas Kuhn, in his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” discussed related issues in the philosophy of science from a historical, rather than methodological perspective, but I feel he arrived at important conclusions on some of these issues. This was a remarkably successful work, and often resisted by the scientific community (myself included), although it has held up well over time. In his later years, even Kuhn expressed doubts on his own findings, or at least, in how they were interpreted. It has too often been used as an excuse for science-bashing by the humanities crowd, but that does not necessarily mean its insights should be dismissed out of hand. This article certainly supports that view.

Kuhn points out that science is not only limited by the lack of inter-disciplinary skills of many of its practitioners, but that it is often influenced in subtle ways by subtle social factors. These are fads, schools of thought, professional squabbles, political thought, funding priorities, academic fashions, all sorts of factors at work that even if they do not change the science we get, can often direct the kind of research that gets done. Science is not as objective as it likes to think.

This affects the hardest sciences like chemistry and physics, but it can also cause even greater problems in biology, geology, psychology, anthropology, sociology and economics, history and education. (I have deliberately tried to hint at a bullshit gradient with that ordering.)
I’m certainly not implying anything outside physics should be ignored, just that we apply the appropriate skepticism. And even physics now seems to be lost in a maze of seductive but unverifiable assumptions.

I’ve often wondered if maybe in the last century or two we have wrapped up all the easy stuff, and now we’re just starting to get into the really hard problems. Our great recent successes, and our powerful new technical tools, may have lulled us into thinking that progress will continue unabated as it has in the past, but we really have no guarantee of that. In fact, we don’t even have any guarantee that there is an Ultimate Truth out there which we will inevitably discover, or even approach. That very idea may be just a short-lived historical phase we may need to abandon now that science is approaching what looks like middle age.

We have a lot of knowledge, and we have some exciting new technolgy, but even these advantages may be limited by the fact that no single human can fully exploit all of them. We’re just not smart enough as individuals to utilize properly the wisdom we have accumulated collectively. We may even be experiencing the first outlying foothills of a boundless plateau, or even of an impassable cordillera beyond which we will never progress. Over and above (hopefully correctable) methodological shortcomings by its practitioners, science may have natural limits; perhaps the Universe is not in principle fully knowable. Perhaps not even partly knowable. We are, after all, but a tiny subset of it, and we can only see a tiny piece of it from our place in space, and point in time.

Is anyone thinking Fermi Paradox?

Thanks for turning us on to that. Lots of food for thought there.