Science's internecine war : simplifying production science vs complicating impact science

A production scientist, indoctrinated by parents to keep things neat and tidy and to see things as neat-able and tidy-able , grows up seeing his or her job as a very simple one.

"Dig up uranium as cheaply and quickly as physically possible, full stop".

(And what happens afterwards is not any of their business.)

An impact scientist, raised differently, says wait a doggone minute, that uranium was lying beneath the earth's surface for millenniums, not disturbing the endless generations of humans living above it.

It wasn't lying there as a metal either - but bound together to some highly reactive (chemically reactive) compound.

Now the millions of tonnes of rock above the ore body has been disturbed, along with many underground water flows.

That highly reactive compound is now free in the air and water to tightly bind to other materials (maybe human livers) and the uranium metal will have many many diverse effects upon the world it has now been loosened into.

God, the production scientist whines, those impact scientists can make things seems so complicated !

They can do so, because that's the way things actually are.

Just as messy and as impossible to divorce from your day-job, as your or my extended family are impossible to divorce from our home life....

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.

Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.

'Yes, yes, but who won :  Republicans or Democrats ?'

We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.

Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.

1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.

Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.

But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.

Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.

Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.

So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....

DOOMERS versus DENIERS : the war between the SCIENCES

Michael Marshall

An ideological war really only gains traction when both of its sides garner catchy nicknames.

So we see English Roundheads versus  Cavaliers .Union Grays from the North versus Confederate Blues from the South. The Orange against the Green. Russian or Hungarian Reds versus the Whites. Revolutionary America's Rebels versus Tories (or Loyalists). Spanish Loyalists versus the Nationalists.

Now we have had lots of (verbal) wars in the past involving Science (with a capital "S").

The War between Science and Culture or the Humanities. The supposed War against Science better seen as the scientists' war against religion. The Science Wars between postmodern social science critics and  the hard (physical) science defenders of scientific realism.

The latest war is one being fought within the ranks of hard, physical, science and this makes it new.

It is a war between sciences, a civil war within science itself.

Well, new in the memory of most scientists, which isn't saying a lot.

A more ahistorical bunch is hard to imagine.

But this war did go on, back in the 19th century ----and in varying forms  ----right back to Plato versus Aristotle.

Today its popular nicknames - given by each side to the other side, as is traditional - see the advocates for the newer science being called DOOMERS and the defenders of the older science being labelled DENIERS.

Two hundred or so years ago, the order of new and old would have been reversed.

Then the older science under attack would have been called Catastrophists (instead of Doomers) --- and the rising new science would be called Uniformitarians (rather than Deniers).

But you could say that two hundred years ago, the real battle was the enduring one between Natural Philosophy and Natural History.

(I support this viewpoint myself.)

But whatever, the substance of the disagreement between various kinds of science and scientists remained unchanged beneath all the varying labels.

On a bigger scale,the Catastrophists can be seen as part of the efforts of Romantic Science, itself a subset of the overall Romanticism Movement , to mount an attack on the earlier Classical Science --- and the Classicalism Movement in general.

 Meanwhile in the dark shadows, a new Counter-Romantic Science, (Positivism/Modernity/Scientism) was birthing and preparing to attack in turn.

Think of it as the electoral-cum-rhetorical politics of intellectual ideas, with sequential elections and the tidal flow of the Ins versus the Outs.

With the Ins and Outs publicly claiming to be externally - and eternally - consistent but actually considerably changed on the inside, after each bout of time in  government and in opposition.

The dance of the dialectics......