Hexadecimal Monkey

Funny thing happened on the way to objective reality: nobody found any dark matter.  

Sitting in CMNS800 today, a graduate survey course on Communication, the conversation centred around ideology and related concepts.  What was very interesting to me was how some theorists spoke of “ideology” as a system of beliefs, even illusions and, to overly simplify things, contrasted those ways of thinking against “science.”  Science seems to be somehow removed from being an ideology even though it presents itself as a way of interpreting and presenting the world. 

During class, I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation that was centering on the Frankfurt School’s inability to provide proposed solutions to the apparently depressing view of cultural hegemony as presented by Adorno and Horkheimer in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; however, I really wanted to take a walk down the rabbit hole that was taunting me every time Science was held up as an alternative or solution to ideology.  

The argument that Science (yes, I’m intentionally capitalizing here), because it values observation, repeatability and objectivity, is not ideological is troublesome.  In fairness, this problem of Science actually being ‘ideological’ was alluded to by a side comment, but ultimately that reference buried the issue rather than elucidating it.  

What I realized is that we have an excellent example happening essentially right now that shows the difficulty in assuming that Science is identical with Objective Reality: The Large Hadron Collider project. 

So much of our science and technology is grounded on our understanding of the workings of molecules, the structure and “function” of the atomic, and then sub-atomic units off matter.  By the majority of people, the ability to demonstrate the existence of subatomic particles is the ultimate result of a procedural pursuit of objective reality through experimentation and observation. There is some truth in that belief: it is possible for scientists to accurately model systems and demonstrate that their models reflect the motions and existence of sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules and so on up the chain to the observable constituents of the world that we perceive.  This is Science to the common person, and in some discussions it would seem that people believe this to represent a well understood Objective Reality because the conclusions that we believe as Truth all followed from a structured approach of experimentation and observation. 

So what does this have to do with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?  The LHC is a massive undertaking that is a scientific attempt at validating our beliefs in the answers provided to us by science.  There are a few problems where our current models simply do not have answers.  We don’t know how gravity works.  We aren’t able to explain how a particle actually gets mass.  There is this nagging problem where the current calculations and formulas actually don’t work that well unless we have some explanation of where a bunch of matter went missing from the universe.  The LHC is going to try to find the answers to some of these questions.  The question in my mind is: “how?”.  And, it is this question is where I think the evidence that Science is bound up as ideology is made clear.  

The LHC is centered around a giant detector that has been built to verify a number of theories that we have about particles that we have yet to be able to observe.  If the particles are found and those particles behave in the way it is expected that they behave, that apparently validates the theory.  The problem, though, is this: we are building technology that is built for the very purpose of validating a theory that is presupposed to be true. Fine, you might say, that is how research works: hypothesis, testing and evaluation.  However, we are applying a single lens to the analysis of the problem and that lens is built to specifically find expected patterns.  Again, that is what is required of the scientific method.  The problem lies in that we are building tools that are so many levels away from direct observation (for some value of “direct”, which I also realize is a problematic concept) that it is entirely possible that the technological imperative to find an answer has developed a tool that has built in it many assumptions of Truth in the existing model that ultimately it gives the scientist no choice *but* to verify the model.  

To use an analogy closer to direct observation: if we were to build a lens that was to determine whether there was a significant wavelength present in a beam of light, but through some design assumptions we attempted to amplify that particular part of the spectrum, but in so doing the actions of a kind of reverberation of other frequencies made that frequency appear to be there, we’d have falsely identified something we had already expected to find.  That wavelength may or may not actually be in the beam of light, but given that the experiment was designed to prove it’s existence, a false reality came to be understood.

All of this is really no different to me than the usual philosophical questions in epistemology and the like: how do you know what you see is really what you are seeing? The result of this line of thought, though, is that Science is a system of beliefs that are coherent with each other for the most part. There are inconsistencies.  There are other ways of explaining the world in many cases. Sometimes there are exceptions and the model doesn’t work (hmm… is a photon a particle or a wave.  It’s both?).  

Science can’t be allowed to represent Objective Reality without realizing that it represents only a way of thinking about how to interpret our world, much like ideology does in other realms.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Learning at SFU. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.