Science and technology

Some definitions

I will discuss "Science" and "Technology" in this essay, mostly from a philosophical point of view. It is somewhat based on a course in the philosophy of science I read either the autumn of 1995 or the spring of 1996.

Science

With science, I shall be referring to an investigative process, aimed at finding out how reality is constructed. This process can be described as "structured observation, forming of hypothesis, testing of hypothesis, refining of hypothesis, repeat".

Karl Popper claimed, with some right, that the interesting thing in science isn't what we can absolutely prove, but what we can (in principle) disprove. The reason for this is that we can (probably) not find any ultimate truths, but only find special cases of then.

An example of what was once believed to be an absolute truth but is now regarded as a special case is Newtonian Mechanics. It works quite well outside steep gravity wells, at low acceleration and at low speeds, but starts to break down as soon as we achieve a speed closing in on light-speed.

Technology

With thechnology, I shall be referring to an iterated process of refinement in processes and/or goods. This process is guided only by observing how well the process performs its intended task or how well (technical functionality, usability, cost, etc) the good produced is.

A good cognitive model is medicine, up until the late 70s, early 80s, where there wasn't much investigation into the "how" and "why" of medications (surgical procedures were, for the large part, fairly well understood), but rather a wild testing of assorted substances to see how they worked.

What is the difference?

From the defintions, it's clearly obvious that technology differs from science. Science is an aid to technology in its strive to improve our daily lives, but there is no must for technology to actually follow a scientific inquiry. Ad-hoc methods tend to work well-enough, at least in young-enough probem domains.

The main difference we can see in their workings is by construction examples. Let's look at a rain dance. I don't know if there's actually any tribe on Earth who perform these, but it's well-enough illustrated in comics and on film for it to be a decent illustration of principles.

An example

Chief Bignose talks to his medicine man one morning. It's been fairly dry lately and to ensure a good harvest, he asks the medicine man to perform a rain dance.

The medicine man looks at the sky, to ee if the portents for a rain dance is good or if petitioning the Rain God would bring down wrath on the community. He can, from experience, tell us that the signs are good. So, he takes his hand drum, paints his upper body with red and white paint and goes to the ceremonial stage to perform this essential rain dance.

After almost forty-five minutes of energetic dancing and drumming, our medicine man is rewarded by rain.

What does technology say?

"Strict technology" (I'd almost wager a bet that most western industrial technologists have a fair bit of "science" floating around in their practíse) would say that this is good technology. based on the signs and portents, our medicine man performs a rain dance and rain comes down. There's no actual need for a cause and effect and the validity of the process is shown in that a rain dance is performed and rain falls.

Now, one could wonder about cause and effect. Is there any cause and effect oinvolved? But at that point, we'd be practicing science, not technology. We're only interested in end results (and what steps we need to take to get there).

One modern field, where technology seems to be well on the way to being entrenched is in software development. Especially in the developing and refining development processes (cf. "Extreme Programming", "UML diagramming" and similar), where there's no real trace of science in the end result. there may well have been in the design process, but since we can't see any direct traces of it, we are left to wonder.

What does science say?

The first is an observation. We see rain dance, followed by rain. We can get this demnonstrated multiple times, so there's no real doubt that there is a rain dance and after the rain dance, there is rain. So, we set up our first hypothesis. "The rain dance causes the rain". Now, we have a hypothesis, but we need an explanatory model of how the rain dance causes the rain. So, we add another hypothesis. "The rain dance agitates the rain god". Now it's time to experimentally test this. So, we observe our rain god... That's problem #1, we can't actuially demonstrate the existence or absence of a rain god. So we need to change our assisting hypothesis to something else.

After some more observations, we start seeing another pattern. Whenever the omens are good for rain dancing, there's a layer of thin clouds being blown towards the village and they're moving "up-hill" (in the direcftion where a person would've been moving up-hill, ahd they been taking the same route on the ground). So, we form another hypothesis, "the rain dance causes vibrations in the thickened air, causing rain to fall".

We can now test this hypothesis. We choose to wait until there's good omens and stop the medicine man just before the dancing takes place. Rain falls. Uh-oh, seems as if the rain dance possibly wasn't strictly speaking necessary. So, we chaneg our whole hypothetical model from "rain dance causes rain" to "the medicine man instictively can tell when rain is abouit to start from looking at clouds".

From this model, it should be fairly easy to deduce that clouds are water suspended in air and that the elevation gained from the cloud being pushed up-hill by the sqme wind that causes the clouds to move. Some more experimentation would show us that cool air can contain less moisture than hot adn here we should be able to see acceleration of rain-drop formation caused by having suitable drop seeds in the cloud.

Is that bad, then?

Strictly speaking, no. It seems as if the human brain is well-adapted to the process of technology, rather than science. This means gradual improvement by observing presumed cause and effect is second nature, whereas critical observation, with careful testing of theses, is hard work.

It can be bad, though, when technological inquiry is mistaken for scientific inquiry.

Science, technology and skepticism

Climbing out on a limb, I'd say that you can liken science to skepticism and similarly technology and faith. In the latter case, it becomes a question of "does it seem to work? if so, it's not wrong". The former case immediately asks "what is the simplest explanation? how can I show this? how can I test this?" and it is, on the whole, a more interesting place to be, but it is tiring and to stay there permanently requires a lot of energy to stop one's questioning to slide over into faith-based doubt.