9 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science
"If the science books were to all be destroyed and written again they would be exactly the same" - is that true? I read a quote recently, attributed to Ricky Gervais, that said- "If you were to destroy all the religion/religious books, they would eventually all be rewritten, and they would all be different than the current ones. But if you were to destroy all the science books, they too would be rewritten, but they would all be exactly the same as the current ones."
I thought about this and... Science can also have it's... projections. It's mis-framing of what's going on with data/results. So I thought about asking some scientists- How true is this claim? (About the science books specifically).
Comment by mfb- at 05/03/2025 at 17:57 UTC
29 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Not word by word, obviously, but you would find the same results again. You might see unfamiliar conventions - all names for concepts can be completely different, maybe the signs for positive and negative electric charges are flipped, things like that. But you can build an electric motor with current science books and you would be able to build one with the new science books again, once science has advanced enough to have re-discovered the necessary concepts.
Just like today, there would be some results that later turn out to be wrong. These are generally found before they enter textbooks, at least in the hard sciences.
Comment by 314159265358979326 at 06/03/2025 at 00:52 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
There are certain facts that would exist in 1000 years same as today.
It's hard to imagine that general relativity would be reformulated as it is known to us.
So, is science that collection of universal facts, or the models we use to explain them?
Comment by 20XXanticipator at 05/03/2025 at 18:11 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Well it probably depends on a multitude of factors including the culture writing the books and the specific field of study. Most importantly the progress of scientific understanding isn't linear in the way most people think of it so the books that end up being written might be wildly different in content than the ones that have been destroyed. Take for example mathematics starting with the simplest concept: counting. Today we all use the base 10 system of counting and although there are cultural pockets here and there where certain languages have non base 10 counting systems, base 10 is widely used in basically all applications. If we were to somehow remove all knowledge of mathematics then develop that knowledge from scratch then why wouldn't there be a different counting system? Historically base 12 has been used across many different cultures so one possible outcome is that we all forget the decimal system and begin using the duodecimal system.
That's just one example in one field where simply by modifying foundational concepts in a fairly intuitive way we might end up with a very different looking system for understanding that particular field. I haven't even touched on how cultural understandings affect scientific study and even the structure of academic institutions. In order to be a scientist today one has to essentially go to college, go to graduate school, get a PhD, do a post-doc, and then work at research institution (university, company, think-tank, etc). What would the model of scientific study look like if it didn't arise from the model of western European universities?
The general idea is that over a long enough period of time we would at the least develop a fairly similar body of knowledge but the path to get there would be wildly different and the systems we build to conduct scientific study could look very different. In the case of religion, we have been coming up with creation myths and pantheons of gods for millennia and there's a similar kind of convergence that occurs in religion so I'd assume (although I'm open to being corrected) that over time we'd develop religions that look somewhat similar to the ones we've forgotten.
Comment by RandomRobot at 06/03/2025 at 07:44 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I think that the underlying statement is that science is Truth and searching for it again would yield the same results. I'd say that I mostly agree with that. A very good example of this IMO is the "invention" / "discovery" of calculus (It might be a good moment to get into the difference, but I won't). At some point, Math needed such a tool and many people worked to find a solution to that problem. They came up "independently" with essentially the same solution. The fact that when books don't exist yet and the new books are written the same is a good argument that redoing it all over would yield the same results.
However, I think that science is strongly driven by people's observations. As such, we've wondered about the stars and celestial bodies since forever and tried over and over and over to explain how those things moved. If we start over after WW4 or something and we all live in caves, celestial bodies won't be there anymore and we might have our scientific development rather toward say, thermal transfers through rock and civil engineering of caves.