The Edge of All We Know
The call and response of theory and practice
Relevant reads: Falsifiability & Knowledge Expansion and The Realm of Second Order Effects
The Edge of All We Know tells the fascinating and heartwarming story behind one of the most iconic images of 21st-century science: the first picture of a black hole. Capturing the crescendo of decades of diligent research, the documentary follows wild-haired theoreticians and giddy experimentalists as they bond through the joy of scientific discovery and resolve a paradox that had been puzzling their field for years.
Key to unraveling the mystery of black holes was the call-and-response relationship between incredibly precise theoretical models and the equally sophisticated technology used to perform experiments. This process of prediction, verification, and reconsideration, as exhibited in the documentary, redirects nature’s evolutionary mechanism from the selection of species to the selection of ideas, where survival and reproduction are predicated on resistance to invalidation via observation or experiment.
Like life, science is a process of perpetual revision. It is messy and nonlinear, fraught with dead-ends, loops, and sudden breakthroughs. Still, every modern scientific discipline tends to roughly follow the same maturation sequence, progressing from…
A period of philosophical inquiry and critical examination, to…
Data collection and observation of increasingly notable phenomena, to…
Rigorous testing of competing hypotheses, each proposing a different explanation for the observed phenomena
Few disciplines withstand the final gauntlet of experimentation and produce grand, unifying theories. The best example of one that has, as told by Pedro Domingos in The Master Algorithm, is the progression of physics from the Greeks to Brahe to Kepler to Galileo to Newton to modern physics, illustrating the arc of natural philosophy (pondering the origins of the stars and material universe) to data collection (tracking planetary motions) to interesting observations and correlations (planets seem to orbit the sun, not the earth) to underlying theoretical principle (Theory of Gravitation) finally superseded by its descendants (Theory of Relativity).
Only theories exhibiting the most “fitness” for their environment survive long enough to produce offspring theories and expand their discipline. Weaker theories may prove useful or promising for a while but ultimately result in evolutionary dead ends once all avenues of inquiry have been meticulously exhausted. We can only definitively sunset a theory if it is disproven through a valid experiment and we can only let a theory live if it survives our best efforts to refute it; until this has happened, the theory remains purely speculative. Oftentimes, even the most successful disciplines rest at periods of pure speculation (many physicists are now deliberating on methods of testing String Theory). Despite lulls, scientists have faith that the power of experimental evidence will eventually enable us to circumvent the obstacle and continue climbing. The record of success in the natural sciences has given us no reason to assume otherwise.
In contrast to the world of matter and energy, the social sciences have had a more difficult climb, as they largely do not have the luxury of studying material systems that can be reliably reduced to their constituent parts and bent to our will. Each time we artificially deconstruct and reassemble social phenomena, we tend to miss critical, unmeasured information, meaning we cannot run random controlled trials of national economies nor can we recreate the unique cultural dynamics of remote villages for experimentation. This lack of reproducibility makes social theories dangerously dependent on observational data.
When a theoretical model relies entirely on observational data, it is easier for proponents to shield it from invalidation by casting inconvenient data points as irrelevant, exogenous exceptions outside the scope of the proposed model. This shield distorts the selection process determining the theory’s “fitness” for survival by making critical examination vulnerable to emotion, passion, and other alternative pressures rather than data produced by an experiment. When the evolutionary fitness function filters not only for the proximity to shared, objective truths but the rhetorical potency and popularity of its supporters, or even the motives of those in positions of power, scientific progress stalls.
To see the experimental shield in action, consider how diametrically opposed social theories can flourish within different intellectual environments – an outcome unusual, if not impossible, in natural science. In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb highlights how the physics departments of universities in the Soviet Union and the United States at the height of the Cold War were remarkably aligned; if you gathered Russian and American physicists in a room, they would find they were unearthing the same natural laws of the universe. Simultaneously, Soviet economists were publishing papers extolling the “natural laws'' of a socialist, centrally planned economy while Americans were doing the same for the free market. Less-scientific disciplines are always more susceptible to politicization.
The image of the “event horizon” — the boundary-defining region of the black hole captured on camera — proves that the scientific method is alive and well but only when the proper dynamic exists between theory and practice. Theories are useful but the truth they illuminate is proportional to how feasibly they can be invalidated and reproduced independently by objective evaluators.