The alien hypothesis?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 17/10/2005 Blake Stacey wrote:

> Even though the very nature of the scientific method means that we will
> have to un-learn facts our forefathers once accepted, and even though 
> applying
> new science to make new technology means tomorrow **will** be 
> different than
> today, we have entrenched bureaucracies built to enshrine and 
> safeguard this
> process.

I can see even this being a bit of a double-edged sword (which may or 
may not have been your point, I'm not sure). In many instances the 
older professors *are* the "forefathers", or they represent an 
orthodoxy within the particular field. Generally they will select only 
those students whose sphere of interest (and approach) is consistent 
with their own. Thus, the institutionalisation process you describe is 
more conducive to development rather than to out-and-out innovation.

As an aside, I like the irony of having to "un-learn facts". This being 
the case, they were never "facts" in the first place, except that 
"Science" called them so.

best

> Don't forget the effect of "institutionalization".  Often, professors 
> go into
> "empire-building" as they get older, learning the tricks to pile up 
> grant money
> for themselves, their close colleagues and their students.  Work might
> originally get funded because it has direct military applications 
> (e.g.,
> radar).  However, once the mechanisms for distributing funds are in 
> place,
> bureaucratic inertia tends to resist change, and money -- even federal 
> money --
> just keeps flowing, regardless of the applications it meets in the end.
>
> This is a special case of the general phenomenon James Burke called 
> "the
> institutionalization of change".  When some social device works, we 
> tend to
> protect it by turning it into a ritual or an "institution".  For 
> example,
> representative democracy got invented in ancient Athens, in an era 
> when only a
> few could reach the capital to speak for the many, and we still use 
> most of its
> forms today, even though Athenian democracy's initial causes are now 
> moot.  This
> tendency to ritualize leads to an odd effect when societies learn they 
> can
> benefit from technological change, i.e., from scientific advances:  the
> scientific process, the process of making "tomorrow better than 
> today", becomes
> itself an institution.  And there you have the birth of MIT, Bell 
> Labs, etc.,
> etc.  Even though the very nature of the scientific method means that 
> we will
> have to un-learn facts our forefathers once accepted, and even though 
> applying
> new science to make new technology means tomorrow **will** be 
> different than
> today, we have entrenched bureaucracies built to enshrine and 
> safeguard this
> process.
>
> To take a more specific example, I did my thesis with lab equipment 
> and computer
> time paid for by the Department of Energy and the Department of 
> Defense, even
> though my thesis covered the entropy of electron-swarm motion in 
> weakly ionized
> gases and the use of genetic algorithms to extract scattering cross 
> sections --
> a subject, I assure you, of negligible military or anti-terrorist 
> potential.