Keeping faith in science

In an eloquently written piece, NY Times science columnist Dennis Overbye explores the origins of scientific law. Overbye asks, "Are [scientific laws] merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from?"

Overbye's comments follow a New York Times Op-Ed by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University. Davies recently provoked an avalanche of blog commentary when he asserted in his Op-Ed that science, like religion, rests on faith. Science rests not on faith in God, but faith in the idea of an orderly universe, and without this presumption a scientist could not function.

When I taught physics, I used to begin by making an analogy that I learned from the writings of Nobel physicist Richard Feynman. The analogy assumes that rules exist.

Feynman said that to understand what a physicist does, imagine an observer, watching a chess match. Imagine that this observer knows nothing about the rules of chess. At first the observer will have very basic questions about how the different chess pieces can move. After a while, the observer will start to build an understanding of the rules. Along the way, old rules will be amended, and new rules will be discovered.

Over time, the observer will learn the rules of chess in the same way that physicists learn the laws of nature. As more is understood about the basic rules of game, questions will arise about larger strategies. Just as in science, the questions get bigger and more interesting as you go along. link