Science absolutely needs history and history absolutely needs science. One is how I make my living, the other is a hobby, but both are about understanding how and why things are the way they are.

Good grief yes. Already stuff from 30 years ago is being forgotten in my line of work and the same mistakes are consequently being made.

If you don't know how you got here, you're not likely to know where things are headed.

Besides Cosmos and Connections are amazing.

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Yes, thankfully youtubers like Plainly difficult cover scientific and industrial disasters with explanations behind what went wrong. Thats part of the history of scientific endeavor being covered.

I took four semesters of Physics way back in college. It was almost as much a history class as a science class, IMHO.

EDIT: I was only required to take three semesters, but I had to hear the rest of the story and took Modern Physics as an elective. It also ended up being my best grade in Physics.

Hypothetically no, depending on which branch we are addressing. But it all benefits from history. For those that don’t, such as chemistry: All the properties of the natural world are discoverable by any sufficiently advanced combo of dexterity, sensory reception, and intellect.

>Science absolutely needs history and history absolutely needs science.

It's such an obvious question to answer that I can't imagine the discussion being anything more than a three-second clip of the lady going "uh, duh?"

I read the article. It was more academical than that, but that was the upshot.

How about a journal of negative results? Or let's just keep trying all the experiments that didn't work for other people.

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You could argue science is a part of history. It was developed, and that process is registered in books; that process of development of scientific knowledge is history in itself.

Newton creating calculus is a part of maths history. Einstein coming up with relativity is a part of physics history, to name some examples.

Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn deals with this directly.

Aren't "history" and "collecting data" basically the same thing?

Or when to go back to the fork in the road.

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And yet I was perma-banned from /r/AskPhysics for pointing out in an answer to a question about the many worlds interpretation that the topic of many worlds as a result of quantized matter goes back at least 2,500 years to the Epicureans.

I've found that while every Physics major knows Einstein was the first person to experimentally show that light was quantized (which he won the Nobel Prize for), there's a fair share of even particle physics PhDs that don't know the theory goes back at least as far as De Rerum Natura.

Your experience may have been different, but I too often see the teaching of the "history of Physics" only really covering Aristotle in antiquity, leading to people thinking the sciences in antiquity were just confidently incorrect hogwash, and never learning about the group that in hindsight nailed everything from quantized light to survival of the fittest, but had been suppressed by the religious as impious in favor of Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design.

The whole rediscovery of those naturalist ideas significantly contributed to the scientific revolution following the Renaissance, as was the subject of the 2012 Pulitzer winning book The Swerve. And yet we continue to teach the incorrect minds that were more popular because of their incorrectness while the group that nailed an almost unbelievable number of things still languishes in relative obscurity.

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I thought it more like this, in science, induction or single data points happen and then is part of the past and is analysed, and through getting an understanding of past events, you can start to try and predict future data points. History in this sense can be seen as instances of specific events that can be used to substantiate a claim or theory.

Without understanding it’s history, science devolves.

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Some of my favorite classes at university were part of a 6 class series called History of Science, Philosophy, and Literature. I took 4 or 5 of them and they were very good as they crossed multiple disciplines.

People don't like thinking of "premodern" people as being intelligent, or even as people. Aristotle is popular in modern times because it lets "modern" people jerk themselves off by going "ha ha look at the ancient Greek cavemen people who were too stupid to invent phones because they think space is made of aether." I'm surprised people give proper credit to all the varied and disparate examples of calculus being developed independently of each other.

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I believe you mean "academic" as the -ic does the work of the -al already, and has yet to reach the level of common parlance like redundancies such as "mythical", et al.

As someone who enjoys persistent world fantasy roleplaying, i love running into people who do not know about scientific history.

Whether it be astronomical tools, early conceptions of calculus and much more.

Reason much of that is obscure is because people kinda carries it all with them to the grave since it was good job security.

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A lot of this thinking goes back to the Renaissance. Many of the myths that get parroted to this day are from that period since the people then were trying to portray themselves as being more 'enlightened' than the people that came before them.

I'm having a very hard time linking your article to the many worlds interpretation in QM with any amount of rigour.

Nobody thinks (I hope) that postulating some vague assertions about "many worlds" is a novel 20th century idea. The importance in the physics world is, at most, the connection to understanding the wave function.

As like an actual scientist with publications in Cell and other competitive journals I agree. But this is a history subreddit so prepare for downvotes🤷‍♂️

Or contort the meanings of "history" and "need" until reaching the desired answer. It is kinda open to interpretation

OP probably got banned after an argument due to trying to find vague connections to past philosophizing while presenting it as relevant towards understanding modern quantum mechanics interpretations with rigour.

The attitude that you're referring to I really don't think exists with any significant passion in the physics community.

So IIRC the question was about the ontological principle within the context of any paradigm of many worlds in Physics, and if there were perspectives in which there wasn't a 'beginning.'

I'm pretty sure I mentioned how Everett's doesn't address the origin of the universe at all as it begins at the same point as this 'branch' of the universe, and instead pointed OP to other current models of multiple worlds like Lee Smolin's fecund universes.

Adding context, I mentioned that the notion goes back a long way (so there's been many different ideas regarding it), at least 2,500 years.

Oh, and while the article is mostly concerned with the Epicurean view of infinite universes from infinite discrete matter in infinite space across infinite time resulting in other locations of physical worlds similar to our own, they were absolutely thinking of very similar ideas to the concept of parallel universes with how they described the notion that dreams were representations of other worlds leaking into ours immaterialy.

As for what they had to do with the wave function, the name of the aforementioned book The Swerve came from how they tried to answer the perceived paradox of free will and quantized matter:

They concluded that the quanta must have some sort of uncertainty to how they would move such that it could end up going in more than one place from an initial state, and referred to what would guide the result to one potentiality or another as "the swerve."

(This was over two millennia before Bell's paradox, the experimental evidence of which was now the most recent Physics Nobel and where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will.)

> It's such an obvious question to answer that I can't imagine the discussion being anything more than a three-second clip of the lady going "uh, duh?"

And yet watch the protests and groans when you tell a science major he needs to take three or four history classes. And witness the shrieks of terror when you tell a history major he needs to take three or four science classes.

So I'd say it ain't obvious at all.

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Doesn’t scientia mean knowledge in Latin? History is a science by itself.

Is your arguement "technically, it's possible to constantly recreate all past knowledge from the ground-up, given enough time"?

Because I would say that not only would that be obviously an undesirable state, it also fundamentally misunderstands what History of Science is as a discipline.

History needs science more than science needs history.

Science is resistant to cultural biases of the moment because ultimately, results matter. If you abandon the basic principles, you will fail in many sciences to achieve excellence. The history of science is important, but not critical. Quantum physics is still quantum physics without knowing the detailed history of it. I do not remember all the elements that the chemist Humphrey Davy discovered.

History is a different matter. People can write fictional history and be lauded as great historians and awarded prizes on occasion. History is very much subject to the political and cultural winds blowing in each moment. Applying scientific methods to history at least makes it more resistant to these winds.

If science from 30 years ago is being forgotten, is that really a lack of 'history'? Or simply bad science? Part of being a good scientist is knowing the work done in your field, but that is not in my mind the same as a comprehensive history of it.

“Properties of the natural world” <> “all previous knowledge”.

Absent fossils, for example, we would lack knowledge of significant chunks of biology, zoology, etc including the entirety of evolutionary theory. Which is why I stipulated “depending on which branch”.

You got your history a little off. Both Newton and Leibniz are credited with inventing calculus.

The more important point is that what you're talking about is not what's called "History of Science".

The accumulated wealth of knowledge of a certain field is just "science": biology includes all the knowledge we have regarding biology, there's no separate field of study that consists merely of a list of biological discoveries and advancements. History of science instead is the discipline that covers the historical development of the sciences from Antiquity to the present. It doesn't strictly enumerate scientific discoveries (just like how history itself as a discipline isn't the pedantic recounting of past events), but rather how we came upon them and their effects on society and history.

This is really misleading, although I thoroughly agree in general about the importance of intellectual history.

The Epicurean/Atomist hypothesis has everything to do with Greek philosophy of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and has little bearing on 20th century physics. Platonism, Aristotelianism and specifically Averroism was much more influential on Renaissance science than Lucretius. The intellectual context of Renaissance and Enlightenment science was much more complex and pluralistic than the usual textbook narrative suggests.

Imagine 20,000 years from now. Humanity has wiped most of itself off the map in a nuclear/biological Holocaust. But a few stragglers, a remote unknown tribe on some remote island remain, essentially untouched. They begin to repopulate the planet. They carry with them only the beliefs of their forefathers.

A few of them get inquisitive. They notice something in the stars, and begin to think on it.

Absent any prior known history of astronomy, they just might end up deducing that the sun does not travel round the earth, but that it is the other way around. They need know nothing of Kepler or Copernicus et al in order to reconstruct the current map of the Universe exactly as it exists today.

Having the history available prevents us from having to re-do all the work all the time, and that’s good. But in addressing the title question: no, science does not need history.

If people don't know how we got here, they can be taken anywhere.

Obviously science needs history. In the name of science people have done horrible things. Eugenics was considered real science that scientific community was so exited about. Science needs history so that eugenics never comes back.

Science is absolutely dictated by the prevailing ideological currents of each era, far more so than History by virtue of the more considerable resources its earnest pursuit requires. There are countless scientific projects that could be pursued at any given moment, but they are not because political ideologies dictate those that are and those that are not given financial and institutional support. Science is in fact uniquely ill equipped to handle its own ideological embeddedness - largely because of fantasies of neutrality and objectivity displayed in your post. If you think that science is or ever has been pursued free from its historical moment, free from the politics of the moment, you ought to read some history.

> where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will

The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is. It is far too often treated as a form of magic get-out-of-causality-free card, and peddled by woo-mongers precisely because so few people have any understanding of the matter.

So yeah, you probably got banned for promoting unscientific nonsense.

Science is not universally 'dictated' by politics and good basic science in areas like physics and chemistry, has been, and should continue be, based on what experiments based on theory tell us. There will always be the status quo and controversial new ideas that get tested. A good read in this regard is Einstein's early attempts to get his theories accepted.

For medicine and environmental science, and other applied sciences, I agree that politics is a factor, because more money spent on what politicians want.

But still, in science, if your politically-driven science is bad, your projects will not ultimately succeed. Bad green science won't bring us a better power source or battery. If the emperor has no clothes, the scientists will be found out.

In history, there are naked emperors running around everywhere, getting rewarded for it. Liars and revisionists get extra airtime for poorly researched work that fits the political story certain politicians want people to hear.

Thus idea that science is fundamentally ideologically corrupt is pushed by the people who want to REALLY corrupt it. And unfortunately, a lot of well-meaning naive scientists are just going to roll over while the way hiring and research are done is corrupted, because they want to avoid conflict.

I was being a bit tongue in cheekical.

Historian says yes!

I would say maybe, but not much is needed. I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone with a degree in physics and PhD in astrophysics, with an interest in various areas of history that rarely have anything to do with the sciences. (Though I am interested in how the early USSR approached the field of statistics, so if anyone has any recommendations there I'd be grateful)

As part of my education we quite frequently did learn about the history of the concepts we were studying. It is useful to learn about older ideas of how things were, why they might have been reasonable to believe at the time, and how they were proven wrong. And also something of the history of the scientists who made various discoveries. I remember one lecturer making sure to point out that the dubious history of the man the Lindemann lecture theatre we were in was named for.

So yes, a history of where the field has come from is useful, and is already present as part of an education in the sciences. But when it comes to actually doing scientific research, no it really isn't needed. When you're trying to figure out a sensible geometry for your simulation or analyze a time-series, the history of the techniques you're using really isn't relevant. The history of physical simulation is likely a fascinating topic for someone to study, but has no bearing on how you go about actually doing it.

And all this talk about the usefulness of history to the sciences has been about the use of the outputs of the academic field. It is useful to know the facts of where things came from, but history as a field is so much more than that. But the practice of doing history isn't really relevant at all to the sciences (except in so far as it is relevant to everything).

The converse really isn't true. The practice of doing history often requires, in part, doing science. Be it dating, statistical analysis of economic data, climate records, or many other things. After all, without that grounding in reality you're just telling stories.

Have you read a single word I wrote?

>Absent any prior known history of astronomy, they just might end up deducing that the sun does not travel round the earth, but that it is the other way around.

Knowing that the Earth revolves around the Sun isn't history of astronomy - it's just astronomy.

Knowing who and how demonstrated this, and the reactions to such a discovery as well as its effects, is History of Astronomy. Learning from those events is important because it's much more than simple and pedantic sciolism, it means gaining a deeper understanding of social phenomena surrounding science and why our current perception of science is what it is (and thus also be able to challenge it), which is an incredibly useful tool for a scientist, especially when engaging with the public.

>Having the history available prevents us from having to re-do all the work all the time, and that’s good. But in addressing the title question: no, science does not need history.

If you do not understand the difference between science and history of science, how can you make a call on how the latter affects the former?

Modern historians do much more than just record keeping. It's more about analysing the available material and drawing conclusions from that than going into the archives to try and discover new information since most of that has been done already by earlier historians following Von Ranke's 19th-century example.

A big problem is intuition, and the inability for people to accept that what seems obvious isn't always true.

Learning styles is a great example of this. The idea is that people in general, and students in particular, have different ways of learning.

Some people are visual learners (graphs, charts, diagrams), auditory learners (listening to information being presented), kinesthetic learners (learn through physical activity or handling objects), textual learners (reading and writing information), social learners (work best in teams/groups of peers), solitary learners (prefer independent, self-directed work), nature learners (learn best in natural environments or when lessons are tied to nature/natural phenomenon), logical learners (focus on patterns, relationships, cause/effect), and many other labels that add other attributes or group these learning styles together.

The problem is that teaching according to learning styles doesn't work.

That is, if you go through the trouble of determining students' learning styles, separating the students into different classrooms, and have each classroom teach the same material based on that learning style, then, in the more favorable studies, the students will average about 1-3 points of improvement out of 100 in 1-2 subjects. So a solid C student studying six subjects will get a C+ in two subjects, making them a C student overall.

This isn't talking about one or two studies, but hundreds of studies done over the last 70 years.

But still, learning styles is something you will hear about all the time if you or someone you know is involved in education. Teachers love to incorporate it into their curriculum, and talk about how they're "reaching more students" by presenting information using several different methods.

The most probable explanation seems to be that people don't have learning styles. They've just had a positive experience that they extrapolate into self-identity, based on assumptions about the reason for that positive experience.

But it's intuitive, so people will keep studying and incorporate learning styles into classrooms, trying to find a way to force reality to comply.

Who tf is trying to do science like memento?6+

> The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is.

Are you disputing that determinism is a key factor in differentiating QM interpretations?

Does Sabine Hossenfelder have an inkling of what "quantum physics" is?

And do you realize that rejecting superdeterminism is necessarily a statement on free will (in agreement with the Epicurean view, which was non-deterministic)?

Yes, it's not as popularly considered in terms of Bell's theorem as the other two, but it is certainly still discussed by widely respected physicists.

Science without history degrades into eugenics so often and so quickly that it should almost be a legal requirement that every science-focused group have at least one humanities expert on their leadership team.

It took me a minute to realize that you are talking about 'education science', not education.

If I understand correctly, your point is that there is a hypothesis that kids respond to a particular teaching style because they have preferred learning styles.

Then this hypothesis was tested and shown to be false. Kids don't perform significantly better in response to teaching styles tailored to their supposed learning style.

But, because people are unaware of the history and want to push the narrative to suit their assumptions and intuition, they insist that learning styles must be incorporated into teaching, ignoring the science that was done.

This is very interesting and is to me is more like willful ignorance of a body of research than history of science per se. It reminds of how they tried to get rid of Phonics in Oakland schools because it was supposedly racist and then realized that the new political way of teaching reading resulted in delayed reading comprehension compared to Phonics. Phonics worked well for me and the kids I went to school with.

But all good science depends on high quality review articles in scientific journals to keep the field up to date. This is part of science itself. When people start publishing reviews that are incomplete and inaccurate, the science inevitably suffers.

So in that sense, each field has a history that must be maintained for progress to occur. I see this as separate from history of science written for general consumption. But it's a great point.

It's also true that science is subjective at first, and people try things based on hunches and intuition. But good science is always tested and assessed dispassionately before it enters the textbooks. So it is set apart from other things that way.

Whoever pays for the work decides what work gets done. Science, as a set of disciplinary practices of people, happens to the extent that other people wish to direct resources toward it. Those other people’s desires and goals are determined by historical forces. Thus, science is driven by historical forces, even if its outcomes may unfold quite independent of historical forces (of course, and not wishing to muddy that main point, things like climate science show that historical forces are very much entangled with experimental data, too).

Yes----BUT-----the same things that affect WHAT science is done also ensure that it must be done correctly. We have drugs for cancer and Sickle Cell Anemia because of good science, not bad politics. We have drugs for erectile dysfunction because of a serendipitous observation in a different clinical study. We have lithium and NiMH battery tech because of good science done 30 years ago. Science is ultimately results-driven and verifiable. Historical narratives often get twisted by politics.

As far as climate science goes, the problem there is more the politics than the history.

And any scientific argument based on history is very weak. Some say evolution is based on history, as in natural history, but fossils aren't history. They are scientific evidence. Evolution has overwhelming scientific evidence behind it.

One of the most fascinating smaller streams of psychology in my opinion is historical ontology; understanding the world, whether it be physics, art, philosophy, or the mind I think requires us to look back at what came before. Moreover, in the realm of science in particular, everything new is built either on a historical foundation or a shift away from the previous norms.

gestures at archaeology, physical anthropology, biology, ecology, sociology, etymology, carbo dating, ground penetrating radar...

Thanks. I like this:

>Lorraine Daston

>I think of history as a discipline, one that invented and is still inventing ever new rigorous methods for not only the cross-examination of the sources we have, but even more importantly, the discovery of sources we don’t yet have.

>I look upon the integration of many different strands of evidence braided together into a strong rope of argument in history as identical, philosophically to the practices of any science. This is one of the reasons why the history of science is, of use to science and scholarship.

>All of these methods, which constitute, taken in toto, rigor in any given scholarly or scientific discipline develop at different times under different circumstances.

>Without knowledge of how differently, for example, in medicine, clinical observation and randomized clinical trials developed, you have no clue, no foothold in the next task, which is: how do you weigh these two kinds of evidence? How do you integrate them?

>And that holds, I think, mutatis mutandis, for all scientific disciplines. So that’s one good reason why the history of science is of use to not only the sciences, but all branches of scholarship.

I'm going back for my physics PhD, hopefully, but it's been decades since I studied physics. You know how I'm going to catch up? The history of physics. If you go through major experiments and realize that the technology and the times influence the thinking, in any discipline, it becomes a cohesive whole.

I think it was Richard Feynman who said that the universe doesn't see biology, physics, psychology, or anything as separate. They're all a continuum of the universe expressing itself, so to speak. It's only man that categorizes and compartmentalizes.

The idea that no man is an island goes even further. Nothing happens in the universe unless it is influenced by something else. It's all momentum.