Faith from ignorance

No, it is not about religious faith.

This is about faith in the possibilities of technique, of science to solve the problems.

Now, it is not a mystery that, within my limits, I like science. I have my subscription to Scientific American (Italian edition), and nothing can pry it from my hands before I read it, when it arrives in the mailbox.

At the same time, I have no illusion of actually understanding much... I am just a reader of a magazine, with a solid technical formation - maybe - but I am not privy to a lot of the mathematics that would be required to REALLY understand how most things work.

For example, about Ricci's Tensors... I know just the name, and that they must be some kind of compact notation to operate over some matrices that represents interaction between entities such as multidimensional vectors and scalars.

Probably, I could learn to use it, if I really needed, but... it is a job that takes time, and I have other things to cook.

Anyway, as every not completely ignorant person, I have a very vague idea of the magnitude of my ignorance, and of the limits of what is actually known.

Also, I have some respect for the fact that our splendid (sorry, I can't stop laughing) technology can't really do much.

NO, don't start with "what are you saying, Willis?"

 We only really  have access to electromagnetic fields, for example, so we have no hints of how to manipulate any of the other fundamental forces that act on the matter - not gravity, nor the colour force, not even the "weak" nuclear force.

Airplanes are stuck in the same flight envelope since the fifties, and that that a suborbital flight could really spare a lot of fuel. My 1990's car is as good as any new car I had occasion to try, and a well kept Miura would outrun any car in the city - no matter that the last was built in 1977.

Even when it comes to information technology, the bright light that shines on everybody and convinced most that we are in a time of progress, it doesn't really come to much.

Yes, a computer is a marvellous thing, but most of them can't even compete with a bee's brain. Surely not when it comes to analyse the world and extract its shape, just from a set of visual inputs.

A bee's brain represents,  more or less, the kind of computational power that it is required to navigate a car through a street.

So, when you see Google's car, you are looking at something that  - while improving - is still significantly less "knowledgeable" than a bee.


Reading through a drug's leaflet, you can always find a part about the nefarious side effects of its interactions with other drugs.

What most people doesn't realize is that, often, said side effects have been observed after the drug had been commercialized for a while... biology being so complex that many interactions could hardly be predicted at all, it is no surprise at all that almost any successful drug has killed its share of humans, in its career.

The simplified field of pure technology, of mashing up well tried products of mature technologies, doesn't fare any better.

Every now and then there are interactions that aren't possible to analyse or foretell... transmitters that go into "lock" and need to be reset once a week - by switching off and on - when coupled to a new antenna, car engines that blow their gaskets when moved in a new model, airplanes that lose a wing or two after an engine swap.

Spend enough time reading through tech forums, and you'll start feeling bewildered that anything works at all - which, someone told me, it is the true marking of the technician.

So, when I do something and it works (it usually does), a part of me always jumps for the happiness, while the rest is a bit on the "I can't really believe it" side of things.   

Some years ago, I discovered that people that do not care about science and technology, do not care to know their limits either, and stretch or shortens them as it suits their ideological needs.

It was, for me, an odd discovery.

I was discussing comics with a fellow comic-maniac, and the thread wandered through the issue of medical experimentations on animals.

The guy was some ten years older than me, better at drawing, and he was an animal rights person.

As such, he was sure that experimentation on animals was abused - he may have been right - and that in those days and age (2002) it was also useless, as it could have been replaced by numerical simulations.

And, of course, there was where he lost me.

I wouldn't care to buy a car before it had been on the market long enough to know its main defects, so I wouldn't even touch a drug that had not been experimented in vivo, but he remained perplexed at my scepticism.

I tried to explain him that, useful as they are, numeric simulations alone can lead to circular thinking... the simulation follow the dynamic that we think is correct for the system at hand, so it may give the results expected by the researcher.

But there is no guarantee that the model is acutally correct;
 By using a simulation alone we may not even be able to ascertain that the model has, really,  anything more than a passable relationship with the real phenomena that it is supposed to describe (Yes, String theory, I am looking at you, you, you... mathematical misticism!).

We can not, unless we extensively cross-check its results with what happens in the real world, using some kind of experiment and/or reviewing as much real data as possible (in some cases, creating experiments is beyond human reach... branch of science where this is the norm, are often seen as "soft").

The moment where you confront the model with empirical data, retrieved from the observation of reality, is still what marks the difference between what we call science and the tall tales humanity has always liked to create, to explain itself the meaning of things.

Unfortunately, in biology it sometimes means using expertiments on animals and then, if the results of these are encouraging, maybe using clinical trials.

Which are, really, experiments on humans with a P.C. name.

I said all of this to my friend, who was astounded at discovering me a sceptic.

Then, he scrolled his head and went back to his line "with modern science, we can surely do without experimenting on animals".

The truth is, we can't even do without experiments on humans (no matter how we call them, to avoid the association with Mengele&Co.)... and every now and them, even those aren't enough to avoid problems.