Epistemology of science - Miguel Iradier - Page 2

THE REVOLUTION THAT WILL HAPPEN: CHINA AND THE FUTURE OF TECHNO-SCIENCE

It is being said that this year 2020 could mark the beginning of the Asian Century, or if you prefer, the Chinese Century; though we will not find Chinese analysts among those who claim such things. The authors who insist on this reading of the facts point, for example, to China’s clear leadership in such an strategic sector as 5G, or the imminent arrival of the digital yuan, which could cause the collapse of the dollar hegemony sooner or later. No doubt, China plays for real.

Yet this need for China to do things independently and in its own way is too often interpreted as an aggressive or expansionist policy in the West, without wanting to see that it is the West itself that has created the current rules where the winner takes it all. In the coming years we will not fail to see this rivalry for technological supremacy increasing, with the usual war of accusations and disqualifications led almost exclusively by one side.

But here I want to touch on a much broader subject than that of technological competition that is not receiving the slightest attention. I am referring to the relationship between science and technology to form a whole, what we now call Technoscience. Technoscience is the reciprocal action or continuity existing between the utilitarian applications and the development of the scientific method, between practice and theory, between power and knowledge. Power and knowledge limit each other, but incredibly, modern studies on technoscience, still know nothing about how and on what depends that knowledge and power are self-limiting —in a totally involuntary, spontaneous way.

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Science and Conscience

We have tried to approach a single subject from the most diverse angles, so that everyone has some possibility of connecting it in the most direct way with his or her own interests. This is a minimal introduction relying on a bibliography that is not at all exhaustive, but necessary to delve into any of the issues presented.

Of course our subject proper was not the continuous proportion, but reciprocity and self-organization in Nature and beyond Nature. The constant φ continues to play a marginal, totally episodic role within modern science, which is mainly focused on calculus.

Thus, our preferential point of view is not so much that of science and objectivity, as that of reciprocity itself, to which I attach more importance; as an attempt to give more importance to the awareness of reality than to science.

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From the Book of Changes to the Algebra of Conscience, through technical analysis

In his splendid book on Harmony Mathematics, Alexey Stakhov devotes a section to Vladimir Lefebvre’s mathematical theory of decision and strategic interaction, which, unlike other developments in this area such as the much-hyped game theory, includes an intrinsic behavioral and moral component [62].

Everything starts from the observation that if someone is asked to divide a pile of string beans into two piles of bad and good ones, oddly enough the average result is not 50%-50% as expected, but 62%-38% in favor of those considered good.

According to Lefebvre, what lies at the bottom of this asymmetric perception is a triple gradation of definable logical implications within a binary logic or Boolean algebra:

A [a0consciousness→a1reflection→a2intention]

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Individual evolution of an entity

The so-called «new synthesis» of the theory of evolution has never had the least predictive power, but neither has any descriptive power, and like cosmology, it has been used mostly as a narrative complement for normative physical laws unable to connect with the real world and the real time in the most decisive sense.

To alleviate the evident limitations of a theory that only through phantasy can have some contact with natural forms —and let us not underestimate the power of fantasy in this instance-, evolution has been combined with the perspective of biological development (evo-devo), and even with ecology (eco-evo-devo), but even then it has not been possible to create a moderately unitary framework to describe problems such as the emergence, maturation, aging and death of organized beings.

There is no need to call all this by any other name than evolution without further ado, since the present theory has only taken over the name to deal with speculative and remote issues, rather than with close and fully approachable problems.

What determines the aging and death of individual organisms and societies? This is a real evolution problem that takes us closer to the real time.

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Tao of Technoscience

The paths in the science-technology continuum may be innumerable but they all presuppose a potential reciprocity between knowledge and application —thus between knowledge and power. And yet we still have no idea of what kind of circle knowledge and power draws on us.

Newton’s celestial mechanics seemed initially far removed from worldly affairs but the unwarranted generalization of his principles to things far removed from human artifacts had the effect of turning the world into a wheelless rolling machine.

Society has taken shape as it becomes isolated from Nature but cannot subsist without a permanent commerce with her which in turn depends more and more on our knowledge of it. Any dominance relationship over Nature is reproduced within society, between some parts that exercise control and others parts subject to this control.

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Time and the Clock

Pendulums, circles, waves, vortices, electrons, ellipses, spirals… What kind of «clock» could be built with all this? Or better yet, what kind of «time» would it be measuring, counting, calculating? Furthermore, would it be calculating it, or rather indicating it?

To speak of the third principle of dynamics is to speak of the very concept of reciprocity —within closed systems. The reciprocity of relativistic reference frames is purely mathematical, since it is not bound to centers of mass —but the same applies to forces in ellipses according to Newton.

Relativistic simultaneity, even the local determinism of quantum mechanics, is embedded in the basic Newtonian assumption of the global synchronizer, the absolute time in which the third principle does not take place sequentially but simultaneously. But the same vortex of Newton’s bucket experiment, as Pinheiro notes, denies this absolute time in the most convincing and categorical way —and not only for instinct, which is always stronger than metaphysics. The thermomechanical reading allows us to obtain more information, as well as another type of indication. And that same vortex is already a completely different model of clock, that we should learn to contemplate —if to contemplate something, in this our artificial world, we have to start by being able to somehow reproduce it.

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From monopoles to polarity

Polarity was always an essential component of natural philosophy and even of plain thought, but the advent of the theory of electric charge replaced a living idea with a mere convention.

Regarding the universal spherical vortex, we mentioned earlier Dirac’s monopole hypothesis. Dirac conjectured the existence of a magnetic monopole just for the sake of symmetry: if there are electric monopoles, why can not exist magnetic monopoles too?

Mazilu, following E. Katz, suggest quietly that there is no need to complete this symmetry, since we already have a higher order symmetry: the magnetic poles appear separated by portions of matter, and the electric poles only appear separated by portions of space. This is in full accordance with the interpretation of electromagnetic waves as a statistical average of what occurs between space and matter.

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Questions of program —and of principle, again: calculus, dimensional analysis and chronometrology

In physics and mathematics, as in all areas of life, we have principles, means and ends. The principles are the starting points, the means, from a practical-theoretical point of view, are the different branches of calculus, and the interpretations the ends. These last ones, far from being a philosophical luxury, are the ones that determine the whole contour of representations and applications of a theory.

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Golden mean, statistics and probability

It has been said for some time that in today’s science «correlation supersedes causation», and by correlation we obviously mean a statistical correlation. But even since Newton, physics has not been concerned that much with causation, nor could do it, so that more than a radical change we only have a steady increase in the complexity of the variables involved.

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Biological feedback – quantitative and qualitative models

In a recent paper we speculated on the presence of a geometric phase or phase memory in the bilateral nasal cycle, using a certain analogy between the mechanics of the circulatory system and a gauge field such as the electromagnetic one [34], and taking into account that Maxwell’s equations are a particular case of the fluid equations. It is known that shortly after its discovery, the geometric phase was generalized well beyond the adiabatic or even the cyclic cases, and that today it is studied even in dissipative open systems and in various cases of animal locomotion. The analogy may be relevant despite the fact that the respiratory system obviously operates in a gaseous phase instead of a liquid one, while still being coupled to the blood circulation.

According to V. D. Tsvetkov, the ratio between systolic and diastolic time in humans and other mammals averages the same reciprocal values of the golden mean, and also the ratio of the maximum systolic pressure to the minimum diastolic pressure points to a relative value of 0.618/0.382 on average. Although these values may be arbitrarily approximate, we would have an excellent opportunity here to contrast them mechanically and see if there really is some kind of underlying optimization, since the systolic time already echoes the reflected vascular wave, and the same is true of the diastolic time.

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Questions of interpretation – and of principle

According to Proclus, when Euclid wrote the Elements his primary objective was to elaborate a complete geometrical theory of the Platonic solids. Indeed, it has been said on several occasions that behind the name «Euclid» there could be a collective with a strong Pythagorean component. The existence of only five regular solids is possibly the best argument to think that we live in a three-dimensional world.

Dodecahedron

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Questions of principle

The principles of Newtonian physics are based, as can be expected, in the circularity of its definitions of vector and scalar magnitudes like force and mass; the Lagrangian mechanics and the gauge fields, that «extend» it, demand a fixing to regulate the redundant degrees of freedom. Weber’s law already allowed to appreciate in Kepler’s problem the constituent elements of the gauge fields even if it dispensed completely with the very idea of fields —what changes here is the very status of the fundamental definitions, which are blurred. The retarded potentials allow to account for the essential aspects of modern physics, including the so-called relativistic effects.

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The apple and the Dragon

To my knowledge, Nikolay Noskov was the first to appreciate, in the 1990s, that Weber’s dynamics was so far the only one that allowed for a physical account of the shape of the ellipses, even if it did not pretend to give a «mechanical explanation» for them. In this respect, Noskov particularly insisted on associating the retarded potentials with longitudinal vibrations of the moving bodies in order to give a content to the conservation, merely formal in Weber, of energy; he also insisted that their occurrence permeated all types of natural phenomena, from the stability of atoms and their nuclei, to orbital elliptical motion, sound, light, electromagnetism, the flow of water or gusts of wind [9].

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Two kinds of reciprocity

The Taijitu, the emblem of the action of the Pole with respect to the world, and of the reciprocal action with respect to the Pole, inevitably reminds us of the most universal figure in physics; we are naturally referring to the ellipse —or rather, it should be said, to the idea of the generation of an ellipse with its two foci, since here there is no eccentricity. The ellipse appears in the orbits of the planets no less than in the atomic orbits of the electrons, and in the study of the refractive properties of light it gives rise to a whole field of analysis, ellipsometry. Kepler’s old problem has scale invariance, and plays a determining role in all our knowledge of physics from the Planck constant to the furthest galaxies.

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Physics and the continuous proportion

We already see that there are purely mathematical reasons for the continuous proportion to appear in the designs of nature independently of causality, be it physical, chemical or biological: in fact the convenience of logarithmic growth is independent even of the form itself, as is the elementary fact of the discrete and asymmetric division of cells.

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