Subprime Science

This blog's ongoing series on modern astrophysics has been intended to demonstrate that even in the highest spires of the cathedral, where only the smartest and most capable gain access, where facts and results are all that matter...even there is the overwhelming stench of the same putrid muck that the dirt-dwelling rubes and barbaric clergymen wallow in. (Plus we get a convenient excuse to digress into an interesting topic.) It has all the trappings of a normal religion. An unproven dogmatic belief system, declarations of logically improbable statements to gain social status, shaming of non-believers, a culture of moral superiority, etc. The most troubling aspect of it all is the stacked uncertainties; one theoretical construct is stacked on another, and another, and another, producing a wobbling Jenga tower of "settled" science. (Perhaps it won't truly be settled until it crashes down.)

It seems reminiscent of what Karl Popper dubbed "promissory materialism" and might be generalized as science debt. Scientists progress under the promise that all outstanding uncertainties and contradictions will soon be paid down, since they are certainly on the correct path. It's what one commenter has quipped as the "one miracle" rule of modern science: give us just one miracle and we'll explain the rest. Except even that is being generous, as the scientific dogma consists of chains of miracles. Star Trek writers operated under the rule of thumb that they could only introduce a single suspension of belief per episode without becoming too fanciful to hold an audience, although a given episode still might incorporate elements previously seen. Science scholarship has thus proceeded in the same manner as science fiction. Each new step is counter-intuitive but said to be mathematically inevitable. After a number of decades what do you have? Infinite curvatures, division by zero, multiple theoretical states of matter, perpetual motion mechanisms, expansion faster than the speed of light, black this, dark that, and infinite universes. It all makes phasers and transporter rooms seem a little pedestrian, don't you think?

I've picked on astrophysics the most because it sets up the strongest a fortiori argument against those who use science as a political weapon against us. Our opponents don't actually refer to astrophysics much in their diatribes. (The reason - I suspect - is that the fantastical universe concocted by modern physics leads naturally to a belief in God.) They invariably pull from the scientific ammo cans of climate studies and biological evolution. Evolution is where you'll find the highest density of intellectual snobbery because it is a concept that most people can easily understand: species rise and fall through iterative changes and natural selection, not from design by a supernatural omnipotent being. (The two aren't really mutually exclusive, but okay. God is certainly not a scientific theory, as He can't be disproven.)

Take the theory of evolution, and walk backwards through time. The tendency is to go from complex to simple. After some time, all animals are invertebrates. Then single-celled eukaryotes. Then single-celled prokaryotes. Then nothing. At the nothingness boundary is where life arose by chance. Some molecule in a primordial sea that formed by a random collision of ingredients in just the right conditions had the property of being self-replicating. From there, everything is a series of small (and random!) improvements. Proteins that tended to be surrounded by lipids had a survival advantage. Thus the cell membrane was born. And so on. All you need is the materials plus randomness, and natural selection takes care of the rest.

The major problem with all that is that none of it has been duplicated. We've never bred a new species into existence. We've not seen life spontaneously generate, even under ideal laboratory conditions. There are no observations of simpler forms of life or chemicals randomly upgrading to a more complex arrangement. We're told that it's just an artifact of the vastness of space and eons of time that cannot be duplicated in a laboratory. But that ignores the reality of the situation. It has been estimated that, given an entire ocean of amino acids under the right conditions, the odds that they will spontaneously generate a single protein molecule within the lifetime of the universe is - rounded to the nearest trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent - zero.

Most don't realize just how slight the odds are, or how much remains unknown. The protein folding problem is a big mystery. Most cellular functions are driven by proteins, which operate by changing shape to perform tasks such as pumping ions or contracting muscles. Given a protein chain, how can you determine what shape it will fold into? The answer is that you can't. And given the chain and shape, it can't be determined how it got folded into that shape either. As our technology improves, it becomes clear that we know less, not more. It was once believed that cells were bags of fluid with internal reactions being somewhat random and dispersed. It's now apparent that structure permeates the cell and everything operates as one big (but very small) assembly line. It is interesting that people can be so sure of material randomness as the driver of everything when so many confounding mysteries remain. That is effectively the principle of astrophysics as well. The cosmos are driven by gravity and random collisions. Life is driven by natural selection and random collisions. The commonality is an obsession with randomness.

If the world can be divided into knowns and unknowns, then scientists work at the boundary of the two. These days, science proclaims that it pretty well understands everything in the unknown bucket too, it's just a matter of cleanup work. They don't know what dark matter is made of, but it certainly is there and will turn up soon. Contradictory evidence can be placed aside for now because it is also certain that, as the light shines on more and more of the unknown bucket, new evidence will emerge that shows how the seeming contradiction was just an enigma, and everything pretty much works as expected. The science debt will be paid down because they're holding the winning lottery numbers. All the while, that wobbling Jenga stack grows ever higher.