Science is not such woolly mush wrapped in semantics, but it has its gray areas, too. They are always caused by our lack of know-ledge, but that lack has very different causes: inability to foresee the future, insufficiently accurate measurements, and others.
"Like all social sciences, demography can only attempt to predict the future through some form of extrapolation from past statistics," writes T. Cowen in an otherwise commendable article "Bedroom Call to Arms" in the Feb. 88 Reason. Let's overlook the comparison of demography, a genuine science, with what usually passes for science in the other social Mickey-Mousing; the rest of the sentence is formally true, but leads into a trap (into which the author has fallen) -- it overlooks the response time (of effect to cause) in predicting the future. I will bet you any money that I can predict the stock market with better than 99.99% accuracy
¾provided I need only predict the next microsecond. The chances are overwhelming that nothing will change during that interval. That is because the stock market takes minutes, hours, days, and more to react to what causes it to change. But barring a disaster like nuclear war, the response time of a population is of the order of the life expectancy some 75 years, in the US. Of course demographers are often wrong in their long-term predictions. But do not, like Cowen and most others, dismiss their predictions for the next decades lightly.Gray areas is what Ehrlich, Nader and other charlatans feed on; but theirs are not usually very gray. For example, for the reasons given earlier [Sep 87], it is very unlikely that there is a significant connection between CFCs (Freon) and the variations of the Ozone layer. A recent report of satellite measurements (K.P. Bowman "Global trends in total ozone," Science, 1/1/88) strengthens the evidence that the changes are of natural, and not of man-made origin. It also shows the present tiny decrease of ozone comparable to the increase in the 1960s (which, I take it, was caused by the decreased use of deodorants and refrigerators in hippie communes).
In the exact sciences, the gray areas are very tiny. In 1742, Chris-tian Goldbach wrote to Leonard Euler suggesting (in effect) that any even number is the sum of two prime numbers (18 = 11 + 7, 30 = 13 + 17). After 246 years, nobody has proved Goldbach's sup-position wrong, not even the computers that have searched through untold zillions. But nobody has proved him right, either; for the mathematicians it remains a gray area.
As readers may remember, last August I published a book with a theory rivaling Einstein's.(1) It is much simpler, but to my knowledge there is, at present, no experimental evidence that can decide be-tween the two. They do predict different results, for example, in the direction of forces between moving charges. But measurement of the angle would have to be accurate to one part in 100 million; that's how tiny the gray area is.
(1) Einstein Plus Two, Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306, $36. Sorry, 50% discount to AtE subscribers ends Feb. 15.
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Vol. 15, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 15, No. 6 Date: December 01, 2004 12:58 PM Title: With and without quotation marks
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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