Hi! My name is Brooke, I'm a college student studying math and physics, and this is my website I will use to ramble about stuff I find interesting!
I am not an expert in any of the topics I will talk about, so take everything I say with a grain of salt and do your own research.
Sociology is funny right? I was reading a wikipedia article about the history of some sociology thing, and as it was described I couldn't help but find it hilarious how much effort the writers have to put into coming off unbiased. They have really taken on a ginormous task. Sociology is the scienctific study of society, but society as an idea is socially constructed, and science is a social institution! How can we ever study society from an unbiased perspective if we are doing so from within society!? Apparently the sociologists solution is being endlessly self critical and terrified of your unknown, personal biases.
How does a physicist ensure their research is truthful? Why of course, they validate their experiments by seeing if they match with theory, and validate theories by seeing if they match with experiments. At the end of the day however, what is a theory if not math with a narrative attached, and narratives are slippery. Narritives carry underlying assumtions about the nature of reality, and those assumptions are so deeply ingrained that they often slip by unnoticed. Whenever a child decides to study science, they are unaware of the philisophical baggage that comes along with the discipline. I don't think this would be a problem, if not for the fact that many scientists neglect the "liberal arts" of history, philosophy, rhetoric, etc. and even go so far as to ridicule students that pursue these fields, claiming that they are useless and impractical. However, I believe these people are misled. While it is undeniable that our society values STEM fields over humanities, knowledge of the humanities is essential to building a complete picture of the world around us.
My whole life I have always been drawn to science. My childhood dream was to be an engineer and buid the rockets that would let humanity explore the stars. I think my childhood mirrors that of many scientists. Humans are drawn to the unknown, and science appeals to the idea that the mysteries of our world are understandable. The idea of science is truly a wonderful thing! We all want to think that the confusion and irrationallity that pervades our world is a result of a lack of understanding, a lack of catagorization, and a lack of explanation. Science becomes the remedy for all these issues, and that promise can be intoxicating. However, cracks in this image inevitably appear. I believe there are two main reasons for this: complexity, and humanity. Complexity makes empirical observations and mathematical modeling difficult, and humanity brings in elements of subjectity and narrative.
I always like to say that physics is the simplest science. My reasoning for this may not be immdediately obvious, since physics classes are widely considered to be hard, but I hope that I can explain my point of view. For a physicist, their systems are generally simple. While there are mysteries at the heart of fundamental physics, we have two incredibly powerful mathematical tools that can be used to make predictions. These tools are quantum mechanics and general relativity. I am more familiar with quanitum mechanics, so I will focus on it. Quantum mechanics is the study of the very small, and general relativity is the study of the very big. Both theories utilize esoteric mathematical tools to make predictions, and these tools have been studied for over a century by some extremely smart people. These tools have allowed humans to understand the mechanisms of reality, and use them to our advantage. Humans have a long traditon of altering their environments, but these theories allow us to push further than ever seemed possible. On a daily basis, much of the technology we use depends on quantum-mechanical behavior. A prime example of this is an LED. LEDs are ubiquitous in applications that require light, and because we need light to see, LEDs surround us. For many people not much thought is given to how these tiny balls of light actually work. This is quite reasonable, for most purposes the actual mechanism by which a piece of technology operates is less important than it's function. But of course, someone needs to know how they work, and this is where physicists and engineers come in. Once armed with the tools of modern physics, a LED transforms from something somewhat miraculous to merely a result of the basic interactions between electrons and photons. Perhaps a more sobering example would be the nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb is capable of killing hundreds of thousands of humans in a fraction of a second. When it detonates it leaves a lifeless hellscape in its wake. Experiencing the Bomb inspired the creation of Godzilla, a prehistoric creature that sought to destroy humanity after it was awakened by nuclear activity. When we try to conceptualize the power of the Bomb we are forced to consider it as something primordial and vengeful, a physical manifestation of our hubris. Despite our narratives though, the bomb itself has no motivation and it is not some force outside of our understanding. At its core, no pun intended, the bomb is nothing more than a science experiment. Similarly to an LED, the actual physics at play are suprisingly simple. The destructive power of the bomb is a product of nuclear reactions that are well understood mathematically. It was devised by men in uniform sitting around a table. It was enabled by physicists scrawling on a chalk board. The discovery that matter contains unimaginable amounts of energy is a physics discovery, what we use that energy for is a human descision.
I think that these examples are key to understanding why science is so highly valued in our society, and subsequently why humanities are so undervalued. I believe it ultimately comes down to the relationships between academics and people in power. Why do powerful institutions fund the natural sciences? Obviously because progress in the sciences has value to them. Scientific advancement is beneficial to everyone, personally I am a big fan of modern medicine and refrigeration, to name a few. However, scientific progress has consistiently and disproportionately benefited the most powerful people in society. Stepping back to classical physics, the development of thermodynamics was critical to the success of the industrial revolution by enabling the design of heat engines. Later, Electromagnetic theory gave birth to modern communications. These technologies transformed industrial and military technology, and could not have happened without the underlying science. Unsuprisingly, industrialists and military leaders took note. Since WW2 and the birth of modern physics, the connection between power and science has only strengthened. Those in power recognize that science allows us to control and shape reality in extraordinary ways. They have created a skilled workforce of scientists and engineers that serve to harness this control to make ever deadlier tools of war. If you go to an engineering school in the USA, study spaces are sponsored by Lockheed Martin and defense contractors are a common sight at job fairs. Even more troubling than this are the attitudes of the students. For example, most seem to recognize the destruction that these corporations bring, but for various reasons choose to ignore this fact. Sometimes this is out of ignorance; the idea that we are justified in creating these weapons because they defend us from foreign threats. This is the idea that is most widely promoted by the media and politicians. America is positioned as the nobel defender against tyranny in our world, and our unimaginably large defense budget is necessary to ensure freedom for all. This is an appealing narrative, but it fails to recognize the historical role of the USA. There are countless examples from history where we were the ones peretuating tyranny and restricting freedoms. I don't want to focus on these examples in depth, but a few include: the genocide of Indigenous Americans, interventions in Latin America, and the Iraq war. In all of these cases, American leaders imposed their will onto out-groups using the USA's vast industrial, military, and technological resources. Despite this, these events are rarely fully integrated into our picture of "America" and the narrative of our history that accompanies it. As a result, many students accept the narrative they were taught, and go through their life without questioning its truthfulness. This leads them to knowingly contribute to the evils of our world while at the same time thinking they are doing good.
As a brief aside, I want to talk about the issue of complexity. Even our most precise theories lose some of their original utility as they are applied to increasingly complicated systems. For example, quantum mechanical calculations are impossible for any atom larger than a hydrogen atom. When we attempt to model any system that is relevent to everyday experience, we are forced to use statistical methods and approximations. In many cases, these approximations are good enough, but sometimes, as we transition to a larger scale, phenomena emerge that are difficult/impossible to predict. I believe the task of predicting emergent phenomena is the greatest challenge to physics today. After all, the most mysterious things in our universe can be viewed as emerging from something more fundamental. To illustrate this, I'll give a few examples. Perhaps the most obvious and mysterious emergent phenomena is that of life! We know that life is built out of fundamentally the same stuff as everything else in the universe. When you zoom in, a carbon atom in a jellyfish is indistinguishable from a carbon atom drifting in the interstellar medium. What makes a "jellyfish" is the way that atoms are arranged into molecules, how those molecules interact with eachother to form cells, how those cells interact to form tissues, and so on. However, at the end of this chain of scales, we experience life as something entirely distinct from non-life. We have a sense of individuality, we can percieve and respond to the world around us, and we have an element of subjectivity. Can these things be reduced to consequences of quantum mechanics? Perhaps, but I am not convinced. Turbulence in fluids is a classical example of emergence. We have the Navier-Stokes equations, but for reasons that are unimportant, these equations are almost impossible to solve exactly. In fact, proving when well-behaved solutions even exist is a problem with a million dollar prize attached. Additionally, almost all fluid flows can be classified as turbulent. Turblent flows have a few interesting characteristics: they are irregular, chaotic (sensitive to initial conditions), and display multi-scale structures. The presence of multi-scale structures is one of the major factors that makes modeling turbulence so difficult. This issue is strikingly similar to the issue of modeling life. In biological systems, just as in turbulent fluids, behavior at any scale is influenced by behavior at all scales. There is a tangled web of causes and effects, and it is unclear how we can make sense of this. We can see from these examples in physics and biology that complexity quickly erodes the predictive power of a theory.
So, if science is valued because of its utility to those in power, its natural to wonder where the humanities fit in. First of all, what do I mean when I say "the humanities"? I am using the term very broadly, including history, art, and liturature, but also the "soft sciences" such as sociology, anthropology, and others. It is evident that these fields are significantly less funded than "hard sciences", and I believe that the reasons for this are somewhat insidious. These disciplines all study extremely complex systems, and thus, for the reasons I just explained, are difficult or impossible to model mathematically. The lack of mathematical theory means that these fields lack meaningful predictive power. This does not mean that they lack value, in fact, I feel that they have overwhelming value in spite of or even because of this. I do not feel that a lack of mathematics inherently means that a theory is "less rigorous" than a more mathematical one, since in many cases it is unclear if a mathematical description is even possible! The branch of math that is most commonly used in "hard science" is differential equations. A differential equation simply states a relationship between two or more properties, eg. position, velocity, acceleration. We then solve the differential equation to yield an explicit formula that describes the variable we are interested in. Behind this math though, is the same thing behind the theories of "soft sciences": a statement of cause and effect. The only significant difference between them is the number of causes and effects, as well as the complexity of their relationships. In physical sciences, we have developed interesting ways to deal with complexity. In some cases, we start with a system we are able to model precisely, and then gradually add complexity to approach the system we are actually interested in. In other cases, we start with a large scale model of essentially homogeneous "stuff" and seperate it into smaller and smaller regions that we can work with computationally.