Quantum Non-Linearity: Watson, Crick, Franklin, Wilkins & Scientific Wisdom.

Friday, May 28, 2021

Watson, Crick, Franklin, Wilkins & Scientific Wisdom.

DNA Pioneers: James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.

See : https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/dna_checklist

I recently re-watched a video I had recorded way back in the March of 2003. It was recorded from the UK's Channel 4 and was entitled DNA: The secret of life. It told the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA. James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins appeared on the programme. Also appearing was Raymond Gosling who at the time was a PhD student and lab assistant to Rosalind Franklin. According to the program Franklin and Wilkins of King's College were the experimentalists who generated the X-Ray diffraction patterns which so helped Crick and Watson to successfully theorise about the structure of DNA. It's not that the King's College team weren't theorists themselves, but they also did the hard work of getting the necessary experimental data about DNA. It is very easy to put Crick and Watson into the role of the "lazy lads" who just theorised together down at the pub and let others do the hands-on science. That they appeared to be riding on the backs of others was the cause of tension. But whatever, they were clearly very bright guys who can rightly claim credit for making the right inferences from the data. It didn't help the King's College team that Franklin and Wilkins had a poor relationship; in contrast it seems that Watson and Crick worked well together (and drank well together!). Also, that Franklin was a pretty woman in a largely man's world may have introduced frustrating pressures and detrimentally affected her attitudes. Or perhaps she was just a awkward personality.

The programme tells us of Watson and Crick's first attempt at a model. The King's College team came to have a look at this model. But when Rosalind Franklin saw it she laughed out loud; in the light of the experimental data the King's team had accumulated the model was clearly wrong. Watson & Crick were suffering from their working in a too rarified experimental semi-vacuum. Then one day Wilkins, who seems to have been an obliging sort of character, showed Watson an X shaped diffraction pattern that the King's team had obtained. Watson and Crick knew immediately that this implied DNA was a double helix and they went on to develop the correct model we are all familiar with. Lab assistant Ray Gosling takes up the story:

Wilkins undoubtedly (and I think if you ask him he will say he did), if there are any cats to be let out of any bags, he had done it.

To which Wilkins responded:

Well I suppose it's perfectly true, but science isn't supposed to be kept in bags, no more than cats. I mean, I don't know what he means but I don't like as a scientist working away and sort of "Oh no! I mustn't tell the other scientists". I don't think it's the way to be working. Science ought to be an open activity, so you can work as a community.

Well yes, in theory, that's the ideal world: that's wisdom we should aspire to, take home and act on: But no, we aren't in that kind of world; we're in a human world. Human beings can't be so detached and dispassionate. Competition, reputations, making a name for yourself, not to mention wealth & fame are at stake and have a strong tendency to trump the cooperation and community effort thing. The consequent mutual distrust means that people keep their cards close to their chests. Competition vs community effort! It's all very reminiscent of the capitalist conundrum of free market vs community. And yet again I'm reminded of Philippians 2:1-11 which seems to be the key to community living.

During the program, Maurice Wilkins also came out with another pearl of Wisdom. As we've seen Crick and Watson's first model was laughed off stage by Rosalind Franklin. But of this failed attempt Wilkins comments wisely as follows:

One might say but why not? It's an exploration to make a model. You make a model and if you make a bit of a fool of yourself in the process why worry? ....you might get lucky!

A big lesson there for all blue sky theorists: Its any exploration and there's no telling whether you are going to make a fool of yourself or win the jackpot - most likely the former,. So enjoy he ride while it lasts; you may not be the chosen one after all!

Useful Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-science-did-watson-and-crick-really-steal-rosalind-franklins-data

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Friday, May 28, 2021

Watson, Crick, Franklin, Wilkins & Scientific Wisdom.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION