Lineage

This whole little remembrance was set off by a piece over at Ugo Bardi's place. 

Ron Ragsdale was my first university chemistry prof.  Bless his soul.  He did right by me.

1972 in Utah.  Dumb-ass hick from Sunset thinking he is going to light up the big city.  Ron was one of those kindly souls in higher education who was comfortable knocking that nonsense out of me.

But, he and Jerry (his faithful demonstrations guy) managed the near impossible, convinced a kid from the sticks that science is a bunch of hard work and that the best scientists said things like "well, shit, I really expected that to work!   Back to the drawing board".

Took me a while to get to the upper sanctums of the academic profession.  A tour as an infantryman chopped out a pretty big chunk of time.  When I came back, I went biochem rather than hardball chemistry because, well, it was easier and the biology types were a little looser than the chemistry types and that allowed me more frequent opportunities to chase women and drink heavily (picked up these habits in the aforementioned infantry).  But this decision led Ron to take me into his office and give me a serious talk about his view of science.

When you stripped away the politeness and the obvious concern about my moral lapses (these were fair game) he was mostly concerned about my orthodoxy.  He had no problem with the goals of the biochem crowd, but he was concerned about their methodology and his perception about their lackadaisical approach to method.  Mostly he was concerned about what he perceived as a freakishly obvious subservience of science to economics.

I spent the next twenty-five years being a top of the line experimentalist and a piss-poor theoretician.  This of course led me directly into the economic end of things, because actually being able to make shit work is not that common a trait in the upper realms.  

But what consistently happened in the process is that the process of making things work meant that the process had to have changes and the original theory that drove the experiment usually didn't change with it.  So you have a theory that doesn't really match up with the experimental results.  For the most part, this is ignored because the theoretician writes the results backing his theory and the experimentalist usually doesn't get to write the paper.

This process is doubled in academia.  The experimentalists here are the graduate students held in thrall by a corrupt system.  If they want their magic letters, they damn-well better tow the theoretical line.  

And when you get out to the business world, it is really nothing but experimentalists who publish results giving as little information as possible because information means other folks can steal your shit.  The theory that they propound is usually very secondary and derivative.

What folks don't want to say is that the problem here is that of the Generalized Demarcation Problem.  Just what is science and what is pseudoscience?

Imre Lakatos approaches this problem in his lectures in scientific method at the London school of Economics.  I think that his first example of the way the Catholic Church dealt with Galileo is particularly illuminating. 

Science is being held in thrall by old men who feel that they are right about everything.  Needless to say, they usually aren't.  They are the priests of a peculiar religion who are defending their faith as hard as they can.  There are renegades that question things, but the young ones will usually shut up when money or a job opens up, and the old ones will be forced into retirement.

Same as it ever was.  I am so glad that I left.