Thread by @paraschopra

Here’s one useful way to think about what 🔭 science is.

(a short thread)

1/ Our world is essentially a things happening one after another.

The mnemonic “X -> Y” captures the world and different components of this mnemonic is a different way of looking at science.

2/ First the arrow “->”

It represents the quest to find predictive laws / models operating in he world at different levels.

These are the “laws” of physics, biology, chemistry and so on.

3/ The the “X” part.

This is what exists in the world and what has existed. Essentially, this is the data upon which laws operate.

Documentation and organisation of galaxies, species, chemicals, diseases and so on are examples of this kind of science.

4/ The “Y” part.

This is the science of what’s possible.

Herbert Simon called this the sciences of the artificial and @michael_nielsen wrote an essay on it: futureofmatter.com/maps_of_matter…

Examples of this is things that don’t exist naturally but could (say vaccines or telescopes)

5/ I used to think the “best” kind of science was finding the most fundamental laws such as of quantum mechanics or relativity.

But now I know that view was mistaken.

All parts of the “X -> Y” are fun and generate new knowledge.

6/ Note that this view excludes mathematics, which is really a very sophisticated puzzle-making and solving it.

Similarly, it excludes philosophy which tries to answer things that cannot be settled by science (such as morality, justice or “ultimate” existential questions)

7/ But it’s interesting to note that what many philosophers of the past thought was beyond science (like whether atoms exist) were ultimately settled by experimentation.

8/ That’s it.

Apologies for typos. Science can solve many problems but apparently editing tweets is not one of them.

Perhaps, philosophers need to step in for that :)