Knowing things
According to at least one professor of medicine, half of what they teach med students today will prove to be false—they just don’t know which half. Paraphrased from observations about advertising, how true is it about what we generally consider to be science today? Could it apply to whole academic fields?
Ever since antiquity, there have been well accepted explanations for how the world works based on systematic observation. We might even call such observation “science.”
Early Enlightenment thinkers observed fire and rust and developed the theory of a substance they named “phlogiston” to account for what they saw. As the theory said, phlogiston was an element within wood that was absorbed in the air when the wood burned. Thus, when the air was saturated with phlogiston, as with fire in an enclosed space, the fire went out. What was left was ash, meaning that wood itself consisted of ash and phlogiston. When metal rusted, it showed that the metal had lost its phlogiston to the air.
As scholars tried to modify the theory to reconcile contradictions, they based their study on the science from the ancient Greeks, which regarded earth, water, air, and fire as the basic constituent parts of all matter. Phlogiston theory broke fire down into its parts.
The theory was kept alive until the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier began describing the elements we know from the periodic table today. The theory of chemical elements at least accounted for the well known fact that wood lost weight when it burned, but rust increased the weight of rusted metal. It made little sense that fire and rust would show the loss of a constituent part if one process reduced weight while the other increased it.
As certain as late Medieval scholars were about phlogiston, so, too, modern scholars are about their fields of study. Had the phlogiston theorists managed to keep hold of the subsequent study, the name for the element “oxygen” might just as well have been “phlogiston.” But the French of Lavoisier’s era were in a revolutionizing mood. Plus, sometimes scientific naming rights go to the victor in a dispute. And scientific disputes can be more about social status than about finding objective truth.
Yet in the public imagination, the state of the art in science is by definition what our academies of knowledge believe to be true right now—just as true as the existence of phlogiston. A certain snooty arrogance is taught about today’s science as the final station on a centuries-long civilizational ride. We stand at the apex of a mountain of stupid stuff made up of everything that came before us. Which smacks of the human propensity for over-confidence, particularly in groups.
Which half of the popular theories of our time will look superficially silly in a century or two? What parts of established scientific beliefs will prove to have been wrong all along? Do we, as a civilization, have any good way of distinguishing between what is true and what is merely what we want to believe?
I appreciate your confidence and optimism. We'll know in a few days.
There was another lady in the physical therapist's office this morning who recognized me from church some years back (my hair and my slew of Offspring are noticeable). She said she was on a visit from Panama, where she lives, working remotely, having sold her house in Charlotte and everything in it. She said she was going somewhere in central Mexico next: she had a rental for a month and was going to see how she liked it for possible retirement, Panama's being uncomfortably hot and humid.
I'm now inspired to get rid of more stuff and possibly give the house to the Offspring and do a bunk to foreign parts.