Curtiosity about Scientific methods

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

— Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771) Elegy in a Country Churchyard.

It seems to me that there is a great deal of ballyhoo about scientific method.  I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the people who do least about it.  Scientific method is what working scientists do, not what other people or even they themselves may say about it.

— P. W. Bridgman (1882 - 1961), Reflections of a Physicist, 1949.

The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, (1825 - 1895), Biogenesis and Abiogenesis; Collected Essays viii.

We physicists are always checking to see if there is something the matter with the theory.  That's the game, because if there is something the matter, it's interesting!

— Richard Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, 1990, 8.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.  It keeps him young.

— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, Methuen University Paperback, 1967, p. 8.

Play is a means by which young animals are trained for the responsibilities and conflicts of adult life.  The higher the animal the longer is the period of play and the more keenly it is enjoyed.  There is something of Peter Pan in all of us and in good scientists more than most.

— Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute 1915 - 1965, Melbourne University Press, 1971.

Louis Pasteur, portrait, Musée d'Orsay

Preconceived ideas are like searchlights which illumine the path of the experimenter and serve him as a guide to interrogate nature.  They become a danger only if he transforms them into fixed ideas — this is why I should like to see these profound words inscribed on the threshold of all the temples of science: 'The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe something because one wishes it to be so...'

— Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895), quoted by Robert S. de Ropp in The New Prometheans, 1972, p. 80.

The story is told in the University of Paris that the philosophers there once disputed among themselves as to the number of teeth in a horse's mouth.  It was argued that the number could not be a multiple of three, because that would imply disrespect to the Trinity; nor could it be a multiple of seven, for God created the World in six days and rested upon the seventh.  Neither the authority or Aristotle nor the ingenuity of the schoolmen could resolve the problem, but it was finally settled by a young man, who opened the mouth of a horse, and counted the teeth.  The doctors of the University were not convinced by this novel and unintellectual procedure; but the opening of the horse's mouth marks the birth of the scientific method.

— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

To the Greeks of Aristotle's time, and for two thousand years afterward, scientific truth was best discovered and expressed by deducing the nature of things from a set of self-evident premises, which accounts for Aristotle's believing that women have fewer teeth than men, and that babies are healthier if conceived when the wind is in the north.  Aristotle was twice married but so far as we know, it did not occur to him to ask either of his wives if he could count her teeth.  As for his obstetric opinions, we are safe in assuming he used no questionnaires and hid behind no curtains.  Such acts would have seemed to him both vulgar and unnecessary, for that was not the way to ascertain the truth of things.  The language of deductive logic proved a surer road.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Penguin Books, 1986.

The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only that we abstain from accepting the false for the true and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another.

— René Descartes (1596 - 1650), Discourse on Method, 16.

Hypotheses lead persons to try a variety of experiments, in order to ascertain [test] them.  In these experiments new facts generally arise.  These new facts serve to correct the hypothesis which gave occasion to them.  The theory thus corrected serves to discover more new facts, which . . . bring the theory still nearer the truth.

— Joseph Priestley (1733 - 1804), The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, 1767. p. 421.

One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it.  Though many scientists talk easily and well about particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods.

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, p. 47.

According to [Popper], it is the task of the scientist, guided by the knowledge of his time, to propose a theory that takes into account what is known, but which, over and above this, forecasts what future experiments and observations should show.  It is only if a theory submits itself to empirical tests that one can call it scientific.  If such an empirical test goes against the theory, then the theory has been disproved.  If it agrees with the forecasts of the theory, then it becomes the task of the theorist to go on making more and more forecasts, to go on sticking his neck out.  A theory is scientific only as long as it lives dangerously.  If it is not at risk, it is not part of science.

— Sir Hermann Bondi, Setting the Scene.

No scientific theory is a collection of facts.  It will not even do to call a theory true or false in the simple sense in which every fact is either so or not so.

— Jacob Bronowski (1908 -    ), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

In parts of biology — the study of heredity, for example — the first universally received paradigms are still more recent; and it remains an open question what parts of social science have yet acquired such paradigms at all.  History suggests the road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous.

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, p. 15.

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill-prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations.

— Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878)

It is the greatest discovery in method which science has made that the apparently trivial, the merely curious, may be clues to an understanding of the deepest principles of nature.

—  Sir George Paget Thomson (1892- ????)

Science cannot discover truth, but it is an excellent means of discovering error.  The residuum left over after errors are eliminated is usually called scientific truth.

— Kenneth Boulding

It remains true that, on the large lines, Richelieu could afford to be sincere, Bismarck could not; and to be compelled to insincerity in the large lines is a heavy burden, a large tax upon energy.

— Hilaire Belloc (1870 - 1953), 'Richelieu and Bismarck' in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 197.

The main difference of modern scientific research from that of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense successes, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationship explained.

— H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946), quoted in Aubrey's Brief Lives, Penguin Books, p. 69.

Scientists who are more interested in experiments than in ideas are liable to quote Huxley's remark about 'the tragedy of a beautiful theory destroyed by one little fact'.  I found it of enormous interest, mixed rather often with alarm and despondency, to watch over a decade clonal selection theory being destroyed several times by what appeared to be incompatible facts.  Yet, over the same years, virtually every new discovery of general significance made clonal selection seem more and more reasonable.  The little 'hard fact' in biology nearly always includes someone's interpretation and interpretations have a tendency to change.  No single experiment ever established one biological generalisation or refuted another.  Immunology is perhaps one of the most soft-edged of the biological sciences.

— Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute 1915 - 1965, Melbourne University Press, 1971.

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one question grew before.

— Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929), The Place of Science in Modern Civilization.

At first useless, these facts had to remain unperceived until the moment when the needs and progress of science provoked us to discover them.

— Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire (1772 - 1844), quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in 'How does a panda fit?' in An Urchin in the Storm, Penguin, 1987.

A visit to the Sydney volcano

Looking east, near Green 4.

Yes, that's right, Sydney has a volcano — or at least a remnant in the form of some contact metamorphism.  The last time I visited this was 41 years ago, and I had trouble finding precise information on the web, so this post is in part to save others the searching annoyance I had. The assorted technical words are there to catch the attention of people's web searches. The rest of you, just enjoy the views, OK?

The short version: look for the structure on the right, and go around to the left of it. The neck will be in front of you. The coordinates are, near enough, -33.887471, 151. 285581.

Detailed version

Looking south, on the coast, southern end of golf course

On the premises of the North Bondi Golf Club, there is an outcrop of sandstone which has been turned to quartzite. The standard view is that this is the result of contact metamorphism from a volcanic neck that burnt its way through the Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone. There are also a number of weathered dykes in the area.

The location is near Green 4.  I got off the 380 bus near Wallis Parade, scrambled up the slope to the golf course, and made my way cautiously across course.  After a bit of poking around to the south, where I saw this amazing pair of weathered-out dykes — or is it a trio?
I think the left-most is just a joint.

No matter, I found the columnar jointed quartzite when I clambered on top of the sandstone structure in the first picture, found a tee, and then looked down.  I scrambled back down the quite daunting sandstone stairs (no hand-rail!), and went around to get my shots. 

Looking north from the quartzite

I then took one more shot to guide those coming behind me. The chimney from the sewage treatment works (top left cornert) is a good landmark, and I was looking north here, from just beside the quartzite. You can just see North Head in the distance, out on the right.

That left that part of my morning done, so I skittled back down to the road to catch a 380 bus further north, getting off at Macquarie Light, a remarkably early Sydney structure.

MACQUARIE TOWER and LIGHT, is situated on the highest Part of the Outer South Head of Port Jackson Harbour, in Latitude 33° 51’ 40” S and Longitude 151° 16’ 50” E. from Greenwich. The Height of the Light from the Base is 76 Feet; and from thence to the Level of the Sea 277 Feet, being a total Height of 353 Feet.—The Inner South Head bears from the Light-House N. by W. ¾ W. distant 1¼ Miles. The Outer North Head bears from it N. by E. 2 Miles. The Inner South Head and Outer North Head, lay N. E. ½ E. and S. W. ½ W. of each other, distant 1 1-10th Mile. The Light can be seen from S. by E. to N. by E. Those lines of Bearing clearing the Coast line ½ a point each way, and may be discovered from a Ship’s deck on a clear Night, 8 Leagues. The North End of the Sow-and-Pigs Reef bears from the Inner South Head, S. W. by. W. ½ a Mile. N. B. The Bearings are Magnetic, and the Distances computed in Nautic Miles. The Variation 9° Easterly.
(signed) J. Oxley, Surveyor General.
Sydney, New South Wales,
29th April, 1818.
— The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 20 June 1818, 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2178010

Cactus (probably Opuntia, a weed.)

 After that, it was plants. I have been teaching my young charges at Manly Vale Public School this week, and one of the things I introduced them to, in my role as "visiting scientist", was the one on the left, Kunzea ambigua, which is important on North Head, and hard to photograph. I was fairly satisfied with this one, though I was happier with the bee that was burying itself in a cactus flower.

Still, this last one would have pleased my children most, because I introduced them to the art of determining gender in she-oaks, an Australian and Pacific native genus.

They delighted in spotting the trees and shouting "boy-tree" and "girl-tree", once they cottoned onto how to tell which was which. This Allocasuarina distyla is a girl-tree, as they would all have known, because they now recognise male and female flowers.

I have no idea what the long-term effect will be of my teaching them that particular skill, but I am sure that in some way, it will have opened somebody's heart and mind to a new way of thinking.

That means I win!

The gold mine that never was

James Daly ended his life on the gallows, but for a while, he probably hoped that he had a chance of leaving Botany Bay, one way or another. Like a lot of history, there are different versions. This might be because Daly told different stories at different times. 

Then again, maybe the people who wrote about it were more interested in telling a good yarn. Whoever really wrote George Barrington’s A Voyage to Botany Bay was a good story-teller, but it probably wasn't the alleged author.

Barrington was a pickpocket who could pass as a gentleman. He spoke well, and probably got away with a lot because he had good manners when he robbed you. That said, most of what we know about him is fantasy, created by him or somebody else. [1] For example, Barrington almost certainly did not write the prologue to a play, first heard in 1796, and referring to the convicts: —

True patriots all, for be it understood,
We left our native country for our native country’s good.

That was probably the work of Henry Carter, but it gets worse when we look at what Barrington tells us about Daly (he called him Dailey).

First, Daly was hanged at the end of 1788, and Barrington only arrived in Sydney in 1791. The book in which the story appears was published in 1803, but after about 1800, Barrington was probably either mentally ill or an alcoholic.

Perhaps somebody else wrote the book and put Barrington’s name on it because he was a celebrity. (Yes, they had celebs right back then!) So the book might have been written by Barrington, but taking into account the probabilities, most probably it wasn’t.

There are better accounts, written by people who were in Sydney at the time, so here are the most likely facts. To begin with, while Daly is the most common spelling used today, he was also known as Daley and Dealey.

He was tried at the Old Bailey as James Dealey on May 26, 1784. [2] The charge was stealing clothing and a small wooden trunk, the property of Joseph Shilling. He was sentenced to be transported for seven years. No place was specified, but after almost three years in a prison or a hulk, he left Portsmouth in Scarborough in May, 1787.

He landed safely in Sydney, but apparently had no wish to stay there, and so in August of 1788, he hatched a plan to get away. Some of the transport ships had remained in Sydney, providing accommodation for some of the First Fleeters until there were houses, huts or other shelters.

More importantly, the ships provided safe storage for the food, the tools and other essentials that the First Fleet had brought. By August, the ships were almost unloaded, and ready to sail away, and Daly and a lady friend hoped to sail with them.

We don’t know exactly how they hoped to do it. Daly later asked to be pardoned and sent away as a reward for “finding a gold mine”, but some people thought he really planned to use the “gold dust” he made to either buy his way onto a ship or maybe he just wanted to buy things from the ships’ crews before they left, using the fake gold.

The source of the gold varies: George Barrington said the gold came from a broken ring, other and miore reliable accounts said it came from a sovereign that Daly had got hold of. We do know for sure that he made some stuff up that looked like gold, and when it was tested with acid by one of the two convict silversmiths, the gold seemed genuine.

Having announced his find, Daly showed samples of his “gold”, and tried to drive a hard bargain. He offered the secret of his gold mine’s location in exchange for pardons for himself and the woman he was living with, a passage back to England on one of the transports, and a sum of money, according to John Hunter—though Hunter couldn’t later remember how much Daly wanted. [3]

Daly was only in his mid-twenties, and not very bright, if you look at the evidence from his Old Bailey trial. He was in no position to bargain with the tough officers who were the colony’s authorities. The governor was away exploring and they refused to deal. Rather, they ordered Daly to show them the mine right away. Nervously, Daly went down to South Head in a boat with the adjutant, Captain Campbell, a corporal and several marine privates.

They landed, probably at Watson’s Bay, though it might have been some other beach near South Head. Daly persuaded Campbell to send the boat away, arguing that the smaller the number who knew the secret, the better. Then he led the party inland, before, as Hunter puts it, seeking “permission to go to one side for a minute upon some necessary occasion”.

Back then, a common English term for what later Australians would call “the dunny” was “the necessary”. In other words, Daly went off to relieve himself, and knowing the tracks through the coastal scrub, he headed back to the settlement at Sydney Cove. Once there, he said he had left Campbell and his men happily in charge of the gold mine. He quickly headed for his tent, grabbed up a few possessions, and went bush.

In the evening, Governor Phillip returned to Sydney Cove, and the man William Bradley called “the Goldfinder” [4] surrendered later, saying he would only tell the governor about his mine. Alas, the governor was unimpressed and ordered that Daly get fifty lashes for “his conduct respecting Captain Campbell”.

John Hunter said one of the two silversmiths tested the sample and confirmed the presence of some gold, while Watkin Tench [5] said later that the assay detected the presence of brass. One way or another, Daly confessed all, and gained another hundred lashes, and had to wear a canvas frock with the letter R (for ‘rogue’) on it. In December, burglar Daly stole clothes worth eight shillings and three pence. He was sentenced to hang, and the following day, December 3, he did just that.

To put Daly’s theft in perspective, 8/3 was about a week’s pay for an agricultural labourer in England at that time, and Hogarth’s 1751 painting Gin Lane features the slogan “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence”, so that much would keep somebody dead drunk for seven weeks.

Daly’s original sentence of seven years had also been for taking clothes worth 54 shillings, but in an isolated colony, the offence of lesser value was far more serious.

It was a sad end for Australia’s first goldfinder. Later, even when most people had forgotten Daly’s name, they remembered his “gold mine”, and a number of early real finds were dismissed as similar fakes.

Perhaps rational people assumed all gold finds were fakes, but conspiracy theories happened even then, and some of the other convicts believed the find was real, and that the authorities had forced him to offer a false confession—and then silenced him for good.

---

[1] ‘Barrington, George (1755–1804)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/barrington-george-1746/text1935, accessed 14 May 2012.

[2] JAMES DEALEY, Theft: grand larceny, 26th May 1784 (Reference Number: t17840526-89), http://www.oldbaileyonline.org

[3] Hunter, John, An Historical Journal, 57-58. Online at http://adc.library.usyd.edu.au/data-2/hunhist.pdf

[4] William Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales, December 1786 - May 1792, 122.

[5] Watkin Tench Sydney’s First Four Years, 137, note on p. 303.

The Great Speewah Laziness Contest

Right: about the working dogs of the Speewah.  It's funny, you know, the way that dogs get like their owners, or maybe it's the other way around, since intelligent dogs always seem to be around intelligent owners, but sometimes it goes too far.  Take Lazy Harry: he was even lazier than his dog, or so some people said: I reckon it was touch and go.  As soon as you saw Harry and his dog walking somewhere, you'd twig straight away that if they went any slower they'd be walking backwards.  Harry could shear all right, but in everything else, he was slower than watching grass grow in a drought.

He was working down the Big Smoke at one stage, getting sheep from the rail siding to the abattoir, but he kept getting later and later each day.  The boss got stuck into him, but Harry had the answer: "I can't wake me dog up", he says.  The boss sacked him in the end, but he never could work out whether Harry was lazy or stupid.  We knew, though: he really earned his name.

One time, I seen a tiger snake, and I yells "There's a tiger snake, beside your foot," expecting him to jump out of the way rather fast. But Harry just turns slowly and asks "Which foot?"  That's how lazy Harry was.  And he was standing leaning on a post once, on the Bandywallop road, when a bloke asks him which is the way to Bandywallop.  "Question's too hard," says Harry.

Well the bloke offers him the price of a beer for the information, so Harry tells him the way to go, and the bloke offers him the money.  "Just slip it in me pocket, will yer?" says Harry.

He was tough, though.  Had to be, to go with his laziness, and clever as well.  I remember once I pointed out to him that the thing he was using as a pillow was a steel drainpipe, and I suggested to him that it might not be too comfortable.  "No worries," he told me.  "She'll be sweet — I've got it stuffed with straw."  But he was still lazy, and that brings me to this laziness competition they had one Sunday on the old Speewah station.  Everybody who entered had an hour to get an apple from the other side of the stockyard and eat it, all in the laziest way possible.  Well, Lazy Harry felt he was honour-bound to take out the prize, but he was up against a mean field.

First, there was this big hairy Scotsman, who sort of sauntered across, got to the apple in about 45 minutes, then lay down in some nearby shade, and slowly ate the apple, finishing right on the bell.  The crowd went wild at this, and thought he'd take the prize, but then there was this Irishman up next.

He walked calmly across to the apple, getting to it after just one minute, and gulped it down.  People reckoned he had to be mad, but the next thing he did was to lie down in the same spot, which was out in the sun, and snooze for the next fifty eight minutes, so he got points for being too lazy to move into the shade, and he'd had a good long rest.

Then came this Englishman, who lay down near the start, in the shade, rested for fifty nine minutes, then sprinted for the apple, opened his mouth, and crammed the whole lot in, just as the bell went.  So he got points for a fifty nine minute rest, for staying in the shade, and he looked like a certain winner.  Nobody could beat that, but Lazy Harry was looking quietly confident.

Harry walked up to the start line, and said to the boss, who was acting as umpire: "What do I have to do to win this competition?"  The boss assumes Harry was asleep before, and so he patiently explains the rules, about the time limit, getting to the apple and eating it, and doing it in a lazier way than all the others.

Lazy Harry shrugs his shoulders and wanders off, saying "Blow that for a joke.  It's too much like hard work!", and the crowd goes wild with rage, especially the ones that had put their money on Lazy Harry to win.  Harry ignores all that and flops down in the shade.

Then over all the fuss and bother, Crooked Mick's voice comes loud and clear: "If Harry's too lazy to even pick up the apple, then he just has to be the winner, eh boss?"  Well the boss thought about this for a moment, and then realised that as you'd expect, nobody else had come anywhere near being as lazy as Lazy Harry.  Except maybe his dog, and the dog couldn't stand eating apples, so he wouldn't enter.  He was lazy, but he was smart that dog.  If he'd set his mind to it, he could've won, easy, but he knew how much mental effort he'd have to put in.


* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Curtiosity about altruism and evolution

More unused epigraphs...will they never end?

I do not see that any good can come from killing our relations in battle.

— Bhagavad Gita, 1:31, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.

— J. B. S. Haldane (1892 - 1964), showing a mathematical geneticist's view of altruism.

As man advances in civilization and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instinct and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), as quoted by Ashley Montagu, On Being Human, pp 23-24.

After much consideration, it is my mature conclusion, contrary to Herbert Spencer, that the co-operative forces are biologically the more important and vital. The balance between the co-operative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the co-operative forces lose. In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. If co-operation had not been the stronger force, the more complicated animals, whether arthropods or vertebrates, could not have evolved from simpler ones, and there would have been no men to worry each other with their distressing and biologically foolish wars. While I know of no laboratory experiments that make a direct test of this problem, I have come to this conclusion by studying the implications of many experiments which bear on both sides of the problem and from considering the trends of organic evolution in nature.

— Warder C. Allee, 'Where Angels Fear to Tread', Science, 97, 1943: 521, quoted by Ashley Montagu, On Being Human, pp 41-42.