Knowledge games [Lecture 21]

by John Michael Vore?

Indianapolis (March 27, 2024) - This is lecture 21, "Knowledge Games," from my current teaching gig, a continuation of my Science for Non-Scientists series.

We discussed games before in an our section on Reporting, especially when we talked about How to Deep Dive, using various sports as examples. We looked at how divisions, classes, rules, coaches, players, fans and referees keep things a) fair and b) predictable, thus creating the conditions for when the unexpected and spectacular can occur.

Note the vast social networks involved in various aspects of games, just as it takes complicated social networks for an event which seemed private and between just a few people, through a news production, deciding if it's important enough for a larger community.

Knowledge games have rules that relate to sometimes very long and old traditions. Like everything human, like all the meanings in any meaning universe, these ideas and practices were birthed by humans. Some ideas die, some live on.

Science games have rules for how someone becomes a member of a knowledge club, within which one usually speaks of certain things with a hyper-specialized vocabulary. To propose something new, potentially adding to the store of knowledge for that club, one has to show one can talk about that thing like everyone else does, one has to follow specific methods for how to categorize and count things in the club--and one has to share one's results in ways the club approves.

In our Science I lecture we talked about the scientific paper--a format which shouldn't be entirely foreign to you, given how we write essays.

We should note that nearly every single scientific society I've heard of is run on democratic principles. It wasn't always this way. Knowledge used to be wholly run top-down in a period of human history (in the West) when Christianity ruled, with Popes deciding even who would be the monarchs in different countries. We may think of someone like Galileo as being first and foremost an astronomer, so, therefore, a scientist, but he was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1633 for his view that the earth was not the center of the galaxy. (That condemnation was only reversed in 1992. !)

Let's take a moment to read about this condemnation:

Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings[142] in September 1632. He finally arrived in February 1633 and was brought before inquisitor Vincenzo Maculani. to be charged.? Throughout his trial, Galileo steadfastly maintained that since 1616 he had faithfully kept his promise not to hold any of the condemned opinions, and initially he denied even defending them. However, he was eventually persuaded to admit that, contrary to his true intention, a reader of his Dialoguecould well have obtained the impression that it was intended to be a defence of Copernicanism. In view of Galileo's rather implausible denial that he had ever held Copernican ideas after 1616 or ever intended to defend them in the Dialogue, his final interrogation, in July 1633, concluded with his being threatened with torture if he did not tell the truth, but he maintained his denial despite the threat (Wikipedia, Galileo?Galilei page).

Some consider Galileo one of the first scientists because of his having a "method to his madness"--an idea of how to observe things and then write them down in a way that allowed for comparison of events over time. Galileo also created an instrument that allowed him to see beyond the natural abilities of his eyes, a telescope.

We will see that different scientific disciplines have tools which extend the senses, from telescopes to microscopes, and their methods of observation and calculation.

A scientific discipline truly works like a club: people pay annual dues. , they have annual meetings. in which proposals for how they run things will get voted on, they have officers that run the club, they have presentations of new findings. They have journals. in which various aspects of a field are presented. The main researchers tend to all know each other, having seen one another at conferences since they were undergrads (in some cases). All of the personality issues one might expect in any group of people persist in scientific gatherings: egos, agendas, sabotage.

In other words, a scientific field is another variety of social network. Just as we've had to learn some of the social network of cities and towns in order to be reporters in a community, we have to learn who has the answers we're looking for in scientific social networks. This precludes knowing what the right questions are--and as in any endeavor, knowing the right questions means a lot of digging and deep dives.

One might imagine that cutting-edge knowledge and discoveries are at the forefront of any scientific field. Scientific fields aren't like athletic fields; nobody really roots for the next touchdown or goal. In fact, they can learn as much from failed experiments as "successful" ones. Science, in the 21st century, ?tends to operate based on fads which kick in and, to this observer, tend to hang around for a decade or so, when knew ones take hold. Usually a prominent researcher gets funding to name a lab after themselves, based on ground-breaking research they've published. Then they foster PhD students for a decade or so.

We used to speak of these more grandly as paradigms. A paradigm was a series of observations which gave rise to a theory which guided generations of researchers. "Paradigm shifts. " are described as periods when newish observations come together to overturn a previously held theory. Think of them as being similar to when a sports league changes the rules in a fundamental way, like removing line judges in tennis. .?

Again, take astronomy: Ptolemy. , who was alive in the century after Ovid, thought everything revolved around the Earth. 1400 years later (!) Copernicus proposed that everything revolved around the sun (1500s). 100 years after that, Galileo confirmed Copernicus. It wasn't until the 1920s, 100 years ago, that we began to believe there was a universe beyond our galaxy. . Now we know that though the Sun is the center of our Solar System, in the spiral galaxy we live in (The Milky Way), there are 3,200 other solar systems (and we aren't even at the center of the Milky Way (a black hole is at the center)). Shall we continue? Says Wikipedia; "The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies. and is part of the Local Group. of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster. , which is itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster. ."

As the tools improve, one sees more and more. More observations of the same kind don't translate automatically into paradigm shifts. It takes something unexpected to get us to the point where things might have to change, when the new data doesn't fit the old model.

So when you're trying to get the lay of the land on scientific stuff, you have to be willing to wade into a lot jargon, special methods, learn t look for researchers and research groups who break ground. Remember: the "rules of the game" decide what will be exceptional, unexpected. In everyday sports, those rules rarely result in plays so bizarre that the rules have to be rewritten. There are periods in science when they do.

We may or may not be in such a period, given who you read.

In the last twenty years, science research has exploded though some think fundamental shifts have become rare. . A number of factors have contributed to this: a) more people are trained in scientific methods than in all of history combined (The Atlantic, 2018). b) computers have become exponentially more powerful and cheaper, allowing the nearly ubiquitous use of quantitative and statistical methods in every field, even many which in the past were more qualitative than quantitative c) in the 1960s, airline travel enabled more "meetings of the minds"; the internet has allowed for greater collaboration worldwide and d) the near-instantaneous publishing of results, along with summaries and commentary by people in the same field.

In my experience, most often and recently we see questions about rethinking fundamentals of theory in areas of astronomy, especially with theories of the how the universe came to be. Whether it's the Large Hadron Collider. finding new particles. , or the revelations from a new telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. . It began sending us images in 2022. Here's one headline from Scientific American: "JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology. The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of the distant universe shocked astronomers. Is the discovery of unimaginably distant galaxies a mirage or a revolution?" (O'Callaghan 2022).

In other ways scientists have sought to replicate the "foundational" research of many fields after a major study in 2016 found that many of those original studies cannot be duplicated. Recall, this idea is foundational to science, itself: if my team thinks we've discovered something. we write up the results so that others in our field can duplicate the experiment. (And these days we also release our data so that it can be scoured, as well.) Discovery, adding to science, is when it's confirmed, not just when it's hypothetically proposed or when an anomaly is found.

Chances are, whatever your interest in science, however tangential or remote, something new has been found recently.

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WORKS CITED

Broad, William J. What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs? A new study finds a steady drop since 1945 in disruptive feats as a share of the world’s booming enterprise in scientific and technological advancement. The New York Times, Jan 17, 2023. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/science/science-breakthroughs-disruption.html.?

Cowell, Alan. After 350 Years, Vatican Says Galileo Was Right: It Moves. The New York Times, Oct 31, 1992. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1992/10/31/482392.html?pageNumber=1.?

Futterman, Matthew. At Wimbledon, the Human Eye Keeps Dropping the Ball. The New York Times, Jul 10, 2023. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/sports/tennis/wimbledon-line-judges-hawkeye.html.. Note: while this might not be considered so fundamental as to constitute a paradigm shift, to many, taking the human element out of judging makes it so. The problem largely arose, interestingly, because cameras used in broadcasting tennis could see things a line judge could not. Then, the use of instant replay then brought into question the judgements made by line judges, undermining their authority, and degrading their ability to make other calls and allowing play to continue.

O'Callaghan, Jonathan. The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of the distant universe shocked astronomers. Is the discovery of unimaginably distant galaxies a mirage or a revolution? ?Scientific American, Sept 14, 2022. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwsts-first-glimpses-of-early-galaxies-could-break-cosmology/.?

Wikipedia. Galileo Galilei page. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei.?

Wikipedia. Milky Way page. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way . Wikipedia. Paradigm shift page. Found online Mar 17, 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift.?

? John Michael Vore