I’ve been thinking a lot about what science means in our general political climate. One interesting question is:
Are we retreating from science?
To address this issue, I think of three distinct components, in increasing order of difficulty, controversy, and might I say, intractability.
- Day-to-day science
- Philosophy of science
- Ideology and policy formulation
1. Day-to-day science
This is what I did to get the degree that denoted me as a scientist. It was 80% mundane, mechanical, and diligence, and 20% creative, intuitive, and imaginative. This means reading thousands of pages of background material or chasing down a subscripts/superscripts, factors of 2, or minus signs in dozens of pages. I did theory, but an experimentalist would deal with analogues such as chasing down a bug in the processing of empirical data or ensuring their apparatus was wipe of all contaminating defects. I can say I’m qualified to speak here, with the further statement that I hit very quickly the boundaries of my domain of expertise: quantum information with a focus on the physical phenomenon of coherence, entanglement, and non-locality (spooky action at a distance).
