11 Conventions in expressing science: essential, but constraining
Universally accepted concepts and units enable (and potentially hinder) progress in science
This is the twelfth post in this series. You may want to read the Introduction titled The Myth of Scientific Uncertainty, and posts numbered 1-10 first.
Scientists express themselves in a variety of ways, including language, mathematical formulas, graphs, and diagrams. Each makes its own contributions to scientists’ communications. Since we now understand that scientific knowledge is made up of laws and their explanations, we can look at how each of these components is best expressed.
For a law to have the qualities defined in earlier sections, it must have a form that is unequivocal in its meaning. Einstein’s equation relating energy and mass, e = mc2, is a trite example. All the terms and operations are precisely defined. So, equations fit this need. So also do logical expressions if all terms are used exactly or specifically defined.
The expressions of laws I am familiar with include the equations of chemical reactions, mathematical equations, logical equations, electrical circuit diagrams, and diagrams of chemical structures. Such equations and diagrams are essential tools for the scientists, providing exact expressions, and having become conventions, they convey the same meaning to scientists worldwide. But, again, they do not explain themselves.
Explanations rarely share the precision of communication needed for laws. Here English, and I suspect all major literary languages, fails us. To have no confusion between what the speaker intended to express and what the listener heard, every word should have just one meaning, regardless of the context. You know, from your dictionary, this is rarely the case. We can’t even hold on to the original meaning of “unique.”
If languages did not have a built-in ambiguity and flexibility, we would have no need of a thesaurus. There would be no metaphorical use of words and no inferences. In short, I fear there would be no poetry and a few exquisitely turned phrases. Isn’t it good to have a language that supports, perhaps even promotes, such creativity?
But within the prose of explanations, scientists need to communicate quantities like energy, mass, time, and temperature, both in amount and with a mutual understanding of the quantity being expressed. Science depends heavily on the standards developed for these quantities. In fact, we’ve agreed on an entire system of units for all technical quantities. It’s called the Système International d’Unités or SI. Symbols for these units also appear in most laws.
There are seven fundamental units in the SI; all others are derived from them. An international consortium is tasked with keeping the system current as measurement precision increases. The new standard kilogram is no longer a piece of platinum-iridium alloy, carefully preserved. Mass is now measured by exactly offsetting the mass of an object with a precisely generated electromagnetic force. All scientists use these SI units in their work and publications, so they have become a kind of universal language for quantities. It’s immensely helpful that this is so.
What we may not keep in mind, however, is that these units have resulted from our creation of conceptual systems like motion, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, quantum mechanics, nuclear structure, biological heredity, the expanding universe, etc. They provide functional working paradigms that support progress within a field of study. And among fields, there is considerable overlap of common terms, making the whole of scientific knowledge an interdependent framework. While essential for progress, the requirement that scientists use these quantities and thus stay within the paradigm, can constrain imagination, and limit the form that new knowledge can take.[1]
In the next post, we will look further into the idea that our scientific knowledge, however practical and predictive, is an essential human creation.
Please spread the word that there are some things we know for sure, and we can logically demonstrate how we know that.
[1] Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 1962.
This touches into one of my very favorite subjects, language and its necessary flexibility and the ways it always falls a little (or a lot) short and thus our imaginations are always exceeding the limits of language even as we attempt to create common terms and understanding. I hadn't thought about ways this applies to things like SI and how SI is even arrived at or the fact that the methods used to measure weight have changed, etc.