All that a blogger needs is a good topic and some motivation. The Indian Science Congress gave me the former, and a good friend spurred me with the latter!
The University of Mumbai is currently hosting the week-long event, with a theme of "Challenge, Create, Celebrate the Future of Possibilities." Even so, in the first time in the history of the conference, are "scientists" going way into the past, thousands of years, referring to mythological scriptures, and touting fictional stories as "ancient science"!
Wikipedia defines science as:
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about nature and the universe.[nb 1] In an older and closely related meaning, "science" also refers to a body of knowledge itself, of the type that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. A practitioner of science is known as a scientist.
Wikipedia defines mythology as:
Mythology can refer either to the collected myths of a group of people—their body of stories which they tell to explain nature, history, and customs[1]—or to the study of such myths.[2]
Now, suppose mythology is the source of a claim of "ancient science". The orthogonality of mythology and science is too obvious to dismiss the claim as unscientific. Let me be not so dismissive so fast, and ignore any mythological source of the claim. Let me apply the definition of science to the claim. "Organized knowledge", "testable explanations", "predictions about nature", "rational explanation" and "reliable explanation" are characteristics from the above definition, and let me add to the same the principles of inductive and deductive logic. The "ancient science" claims hold no water with any of these criteria. What they are, if not fictional imagination, are hypotheses at best.
Let me now turn to the current times - that is really the theme of the conference! It was around 2004 that I attended a talk at Princeton by a Nobel Laureate about the 25 most impactful advances in science in the next 25 years. Memory fails me on the details of the talk, and my internet search to dig it up has not yet borne fruit. Nevertheless, one of the 25 items that stuck in my mind is the need of the day to have a "mathematics for the biological sciences". It acknowledges the fact that we try hard to apply the mathematics that evolved for the physical sciences (algebra, calculus, statistics, probability) to the life sciences, where the problem constructs are very different.
Eleven years have elapsed out of those 25, and the pressure is mounting on me to do something. So, let me not waste any more time on this blog. And, as I plant this seed in the readers of this blog, I also chuckle about a controversy I might have fueled in the year 5015 - whether one of you, or I should be credited with the scientific advance, and in what proportion should the credit be shared.
Happy New Year 2015, for now!
The University of Mumbai is currently hosting the week-long event, with a theme of "Challenge, Create, Celebrate the Future of Possibilities." Even so, in the first time in the history of the conference, are "scientists" going way into the past, thousands of years, referring to mythological scriptures, and touting fictional stories as "ancient science"!
Wikipedia defines science as:
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about nature and the universe.[nb 1] In an older and closely related meaning, "science" also refers to a body of knowledge itself, of the type that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. A practitioner of science is known as a scientist.
Wikipedia defines mythology as:
Mythology can refer either to the collected myths of a group of people—their body of stories which they tell to explain nature, history, and customs[1]—or to the study of such myths.[2]
Now, suppose mythology is the source of a claim of "ancient science". The orthogonality of mythology and science is too obvious to dismiss the claim as unscientific. Let me be not so dismissive so fast, and ignore any mythological source of the claim. Let me apply the definition of science to the claim. "Organized knowledge", "testable explanations", "predictions about nature", "rational explanation" and "reliable explanation" are characteristics from the above definition, and let me add to the same the principles of inductive and deductive logic. The "ancient science" claims hold no water with any of these criteria. What they are, if not fictional imagination, are hypotheses at best.
Let me now turn to the current times - that is really the theme of the conference! It was around 2004 that I attended a talk at Princeton by a Nobel Laureate about the 25 most impactful advances in science in the next 25 years. Memory fails me on the details of the talk, and my internet search to dig it up has not yet borne fruit. Nevertheless, one of the 25 items that stuck in my mind is the need of the day to have a "mathematics for the biological sciences". It acknowledges the fact that we try hard to apply the mathematics that evolved for the physical sciences (algebra, calculus, statistics, probability) to the life sciences, where the problem constructs are very different.
Eleven years have elapsed out of those 25, and the pressure is mounting on me to do something. So, let me not waste any more time on this blog. And, as I plant this seed in the readers of this blog, I also chuckle about a controversy I might have fueled in the year 5015 - whether one of you, or I should be credited with the scientific advance, and in what proportion should the credit be shared.
Happy New Year 2015, for now!
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