Clocks and Clouds
Big City Angel by Jim McNitt
I saw this come up in RSS feeds and Twitter timelines to an extent that either means (a) it resonates with all the people I follow on the webs or (b) it resonates with me and I was primed to spot the refs. I suspect it was a bit of both. It’s by Jonah Lehrer and it’s appeared on Wired and on his own blog.
Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.
It’s interesting that the piece was on Wired for a month before anybody I know picked it up. (My network are far quicker at processing my RSS feeds than I am.)
Jonah’s conclusions about how to deal with a universe of clocks and clouds is also worth discussion:
So how do we see the clouds? I think the answer returns us to the vintage approach of the Victorians. Right now, the life sciences follow a very deductive model, in which researchers begin with a testable hypothesis, and then find precisely the right set of tools to test their conjecture. Needless to say, this has been a fantastically successful approach. But I wonder if our most difficult questions will require a more inductive method, in which we first observe and stare and ponder, and only then theorize.
Shamelessly putting words into Jonah’s mouth, this means the return of Neo-Victorian dilettantism. Which can only be a good thing.
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