by David Kordahl
A few years ago, while writing about the Golem series by the sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, I bought their first coauthored book, Frames of Meaning: The social construction of extraordinary science. I did not read it. Unlike the Golem books, which examined ordinary scientific controversies, Frames of Meaning was at once more ambitious and less successful. Collins and Pinch hoped to witness the birth of a new science, to document a paradigm shift in real time, but ended up as de facto debunkers of the very science whose birth they had set out to observe.
I finally read Frames of Meaning last month. I should have been an ideally sympathetic reader. Like Collins and Pinch, I am an admirer of the physicist-turned-philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who introduced the idea of “paradigm shifts” to intellectuals. Kuhn discussed how difficult it is for historians to evaluate scientific works after a revolutionary rupture, since paradigm shifts alter assumptions about what is in or out of bounds for science, leaving pre- and post-revolutionary scientists with “incommensurable” worldviews.
As young sociologists in the 1970s, Collins and Pinch wanted to study a paradigm shift firsthand. They wondered if parapsychology faced a set of phenomena that would upend scientific norms. Of course, the hope that spooky subjects could yield scientific insights was not itself new. After its founding in the 1880s, the Society for Psychical Research included among its members many of Britain’s leading scientists. Even after physical scientists lost interest in the early twentieth century, psychologists and statisticians continued to collaborate on increasingly controlled experiments in telepathy and ESP. And in the 1970s, such topics seemed poised to reenter the scientific mainstream. Read more »
There has long been a temptation in science to imagine one system that can explain everything. For a while, that dream belonged to physics, whose practitioners, armed with a handful of equations, could describe the orbits of planets and the spin of electrons. In recent years, the torch has been seized by artificial intelligence. With enough data, we are told, the machine will learn the world. If this sounds like a passing of the crown, it has also become, in a curious way, a rivalry. Like the cinematic conflict between vampires and werewolves in the Underworld franchise, AI and physics have been cast as two immortal powers fighting for dominion over knowledge. AI enthusiasts claim that the laws of nature will simply fall out of sufficiently large data sets. Physicists counter that data without principle is merely glorified curve-fitting.
The photograph beside this text shows two men standing side by side, both scientific celebrities, both Nobel prizewinners, both of them well-known and well-loved by the American public in 1932, when 
Physicists writing books for the public have faced a longstanding challenge. Either they can write purely popular accounts that explain physics through metaphors and pop culture analogies but then risk oversimplifying key concepts, or they can get into a great deal of technical detail and risk making the book opaque to most readers without specialized training. All scientists face this challenge, but for physicists it’s particularly acute because of the mathematical nature of their field. Especially if you want to explain the two towering achievements of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, you can’t really get away from the math. It seems that physicists are stuck between a rock and a hard place: include math and, as the popular belief goes, every equation risks cutting their readership by half or, exclude math and deprive readers of a deeper understanding. The big question for a physicist who wants to communicate the great ideas of physics to a lay audience without entirely skipping the technical detail thus is, is there a middle ground?
