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You and your fellow surveyors began by establishing one major north-south line (principal meridian) and one east-west (base) line for each future state or groups of states. But you ran into a problem. America is a very large nation. As you moved north, you quickly ran out of room for those northern rows of townships. The Earth is indeed curved, so the northern lands are actually smaller than their southern counterparts between the same meridians. You and your fellow surveyors solved the problem by staggering the northern townships so they’d fit into the range you were working on.
You never took the curvature of the Earth for granted for the rest of your life. * * * This process of learning by picking one’s way through rock fields of uncertainty has much to recommend it. It mates human intelligence and limitations, creativity and traditionalism, and curiosity and ignorance with a strong focus on a specific scientific discipline, producing an explanatory system of natural processes of unsurpassed predictive power. Science models rough, bumpy, textured reality into a mathematical ideal, rendering the abstraction smooth enough for humans to understand it more fully. That said, we must acknowledge that science is not and cannot be wholly reasonable, even though it’s the best system of reasoning we’ve ever managed to develop. Science as a whole is not planned, schooled, ruled, or in any sense guided by any one person or group. It is an emergent system of observation, guesswork, experiment, theory, exchange, and judgment. As such, it closely resembles the biological and cultural evolutionary systems it examines. And yes, Rob Wipond, it is conservative. Thinking rationally is problematical. Success depends on experience. Remember the computer programmer’s warning about data? GIGO—“Garbage in, garbage out.” You may assemble and dissect erroneous data until the cat’s nine lives are used up, and yet you will fail to create an effective model of the world. Brilliant abstractions are no substitute for good, solid observations. This is what Benjamin Franklin meant when he warned is fellow delegates at the Constitutional Convention, “Reason may mislead us; experience must be our guide.” * * * Be an astronaut. Your assignment is to compile data from navigational and reconnaissance satellites to determine the precise shape of the Earth. You discover the following: Our planet is somewhat pear-shaped. The equator bulges 13 miles, the North Pole bulges a slight 33 feet, and the South Pole sags 100 feet. Even so, the Earth, to scale, is more perfectly rounded than the most carefully crafted ball-bearings. You’ve earned a rest. You stretch out by the window and watch the Earth turn “below” you, then realize that everything you ever knew or did is wrapped up in that blue-white-brown bubble of air-water-rock. What once seemed endless to your younger self back on the Earth, you now envision as not even a speck compared to the vastness of the distances between stars and galaxies. Each time we humans study and explore our surroundings, we see our planet anew. The Earth is our palimpsest to the understanding of ourselves. * * * In order for science as a system of inquiry to work properly, scientists had to pick the investigative axioms by which they live very carefully. They had to come up with such guidelines as: “Use the simplest explanations possible, all things being equal,” and “The world is real,” and “Go with the flow of cause and effect,” and “Remove yourself and your preconceptions as far as possible from your experiments and observations.” None of these axioms can be proven “true” in any metaphysical sense. Scientists accept them because they seem to lead toward positive results. They seem to help scientists avoid unwarranted assumptions that may get in their way. They seem to allow scientists to make genuinely new discoveries. They seem to work. Contrast and compare these axioms to those offered by traditional philosophers and theologians: “Use the most convoluted explanations you can dream up,” or “The world is a mass solipsistic dream,” or “God did it.” Note which set of instructions is likely to lead to a greater understanding of the world or further inquiry and which set is most likely to mask the true nature of the world and stop inquiry in its tracks. |
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