Science as Conversation
Two Wednesdays ago I wrote about three different types of conversation. Of these, I’ve written about conversations between people and conversations as prayer. Today it is the turn of science.
Conversation is about paying attention and this is the heart of scientific method. You study data and formulate a hypothesis. (The data might be the results of an experiment, scientific papers or textbooks, or a real life problem.) You design experiments to test the hypothesis and then pay attention to the results. Bad science is failure to attend to the results; a bad experiment does not necessarily lead to bad science.
This scientific method leads to theories; theory implies there is no such thing as absolute certainty in science. This is sometimes hard to understand; after all it is not difficult to point to the many successes of science. But all theories are to some degree tentative.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Newtonian physics answered all the questions about mechanics and gravity. Einstein noticed anomalies in the available data and came up with his theories of relativity. In doing so, he did not prove Newton wrong, Newtonian physics is still useful but is now a part of a wider theory, which itself someday may prove to be part of something even wider.
The Challenge to Fundamentalism
Fundamentalists deal in certainties. For them theory proves science wrong because it is by definition tentative. They believe their book (the book varies, depending on the type of fundamentalist), deals in eternal truths. They do not dialogue with their book but impose their views upon it.
Fundamentalists and tyrants the world over close down conversations. They live in fear of discovering something new. For them truth has to be nailed down to be true.
The challenge, if you are marketing a message online, is to encourage conversation, not to impose views. Conversation is a learning experience and if you commit to genuine sharing, your website and your real life business or project will become learning experiences.
In my next post, I shall show how conversation can become a learning experience and more!
What do you think? Conversations with matter? Do you find them more or less stimulating than conversations with people?