Ernest Rutherford 


"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Or at least, that was the opinion of the first great experimental physicist of the modern age, namely Ernest Rutherford. The large majority of scientists in the commonly called "natural sciences" - namely Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, and Medicine - feel much the same as Rutherford did. 

The term "social science", for them, is an unfortunate oxymoron used in ordinary discourse, but what is done in Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. - for most physicists, chemists, and biologists - is not science. "Social science" lacks rigor. It lacks models that describe reality in mathematical terms, models that can be tested, data that can be replicated by any researcher anywhere, no matter what his or her worldview or biases. For physical scientists, truth is not a matter of opinion and is not a social construct that varies from culture to culture. In fact, for physical scientists, such talk is nonsense. Reality is what it is. 

I bring up this matter today because I want to exhort the thinkers in my readership - including both kinds of scientists, and the artists, writers and philosophers and even the economists - to get into the game. The real game. The most urgent task in front of our thinking species in this century is to bring all human endeavors under one theoretical - and moral - umbrella. Finding indisputable evidence of the existence of the Higgs Boson or writing a libretto for a new rock opera - or any human activity in between - all of these pale in comparison to our figuring out what right and wrong really are.

I repeat: if this moral realism task looks hard to you, think about the alternative. 

On board the Titanic, after she struck the iceberg, the men in the boiler rooms got orders to draw the fires; this means they were to remove all of the coal that was currently burning under the boilers and making steam for the engines. The fear was that if icy seawater hit the boilers, they would crack and explode. (There were six boiler rooms containing 29 boilers on Titanic.) 

We know from survivors testimonies that in at least one of the boiler rooms the stokers worked like devils and managed to get the fires drawn and out. They did have some seepage of seawater coming in, but their pumps were working smoothly. Their floor was beginning to tilt, but that was not their concern. They just did their duty and did it well. Then, the Titanic shifted a bit, tilted a bit more, and a wall of seawater a meter high came over their partitions. 

In the shadow of the tilting partitions of the twenty first century, have a nice day anyway.