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Posted by: Malcolm Povey on May 12, 2007 - 09:37 PM
PopularScience
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Introduction - What is Science?
Modern Science is a product of the enlightenment and the bourgeois revolutions, depending for its development on industrialism and factory production methods for the manufacture of scientific instruments. In turn, modern capitalism could not have come into being without science (science at the crossroads - Bukharin, full reference required) For Karl Marx, Science is one of the forces of production.
Science is in essence social human activity in which a picture (theory) of the material world around us is used to act upon the world, in order to satisfy human needs - food, shelter, clothing ... This picture has been continually refined throughout human history as our control over the world around us has extended. In this view of science, some sort of scientific view is essential for human existence.
Modern science requires a materialist view of the world, together with 'objectivity'. Materialism involves the recognition of a world whose existence does not depend on human consciousness. Objectivity requires that any scientific idea is capable of understanding by human beings other than the originator, that the ideas lead to testable predictions and that the predictions may be independently tested by third parties. All scientific theories are in a permanent state of 'testability', therefore science is not dogmatic (because scientific theories are testable and hence potentially refutable) and because the test must be made against a reality whose existence is not dependent on human consciousness, scientific theories are materialistic (not mystical).
Modern Science under Attack?
Science in capitalist society has always had a contradictory position. This contradiction arises because, as one of the forces of production, it must simultaneously satisfy human need and competitive capital accumulation. Science requires time and money, our time is continually under pressure from the need to sell our labour, 'earn' our wages and hence buy what is required to satisfy our needs. So the capitalist monopolises the questions addressed by scientific endeavour and employs most scientists. The wage labour process also 'alienates' science from its human origins, setting it 'above' the human beings who create it. An example of this is the immense investment going into nuclear power which can only be understood in the context of a militarised world competition whose ultimate terror weapon is the atomic bomb. 40% of the European Union budget for scientific research over the next 6 years is planned to be spent on nuclear development. On the other hand, little research effort is going into solving the developing epidemic in obesity and diabetes, and the proportion of the EU budget addressing renewable energy resources is one tenth that devoted to nuclear. Another example is the 'Dr Brainiac' caricature of the scientist, in which science is the province of the specialist, outside the understanding of the public in general.
The features described in the paragraph above have been present at least since the end of the Second World War. It was the gigantic Manhattan project which marked the end of the scientist as a bourgeois individual and the beginning of science as an industrial process, with division of labour, factory management methods and industrial production methods. The 'successes' of this big scale science lead to the establishment of huge laboratories such as CERN in Geneva and the Bell Labs in the USA. The impetus of the cold war and military competition lead to the space race, new communication needs, and new scientific horizons. Basic science in universities initially reflected the bourgeois individual of the enlightenment, James Watt setup the thermodynamics laboratory at Glasgow University in the 18th century using the profits from his steam lifting gear in mines. One single mine generated an income of £6000 per year, a fortune at the time. Physics was called natural philosophy, recognition of its origin in the enlightenment. The new sciences - quantum mechanics, relativity, partly driven by the military competition of the cold war and the space race; lead to a new approach to science in the universities as a cadre of scientists versed in the new ways of thinking and experimenting had to be trained to underpin the vast expansion in the electronics industry which underpinned the new technologies, themselves based on the revolutionary new science of quantum mechanics. Big industrial labs, such as the Bell Labs in which the transistor was invented were setup, modelled on the Manhattan Project approach. Interestingly, some aspects of the enlightenment were retained within these huge labs with a few privileged individuals permitted to study and think as they felt fit. This was needed because it was recognised that scientific IDEAS were crucial to creating new developments, including new weapons! Nevertheless, the emphasis was on 'training' and supporting industry so ideas became of lesser importance and the term 'Natural Philosophy' was dropped. Similarly, developments were taking place in the chemical industry, also influenced by the new quantum mechanics and this in turn gave rise to the pharmaceutical industry as principles for drug development became apparent.
Why are Science Departments being closed today?
The neo-liberal economics and politics of the 21st century with its accompanying social liberalism which dominates much political discourse have placed the large physics and chemistry departments which developed in the last century in response to the forces outlined above, into an economic vice. On the one hand they are expected to compete economically with departments such as media studies which need far less laboratory investment. On the other hand, students paying fees see less relevance for the hard discipline of the basic science in terms of future jobs. Therefore, declining student numbers and rising laboratory costs make the departments relatively more expensive to run. Finally, the maturation of the industries developed on the back of the 20th century scientific revolution, electronics, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals and so on, has lead to a reduction in demand for scientists and a relative fall in their earning power. In addition, the development of these industries into transnational corporations and the use of English as the world language of science have allowed corporations to plunder the best scientists from wherever in the world they happen to have been educated. So Higher Education in Britain is now subject to competition from the whole world. Social Liberalism places the market before all else and hence, within Higher Education, academic arguments take second place to monetary considerations.
To some degree, the state has recognised the threat to its industrial base from the decline in the numbers of science students. However, the British state is split over just how important industrial production and innovation is in any case, given the growing importance to the economy of the financial sector. Its response tends to be piecemeal, certainly in comparison to economies such as the French and German which put relatively greater value on industrial output.
There is another factor at play, ideology. In train with neo-liberalism has come a mechanical view of the market, which downplays the importance of ideas and indeed that of science itself. In the schools the twin pressure of 'dumbing-down' where the state sees the schools' job as purely one of producing workers who do not think independently, and of economic pressure has meant a massive reduction in the amount of 'experimental' science taught in schools. At its best, the importance of experiment is its emphasis on a materialism which gives the data pre-eminence and an insistence that scientific theories must be consistent with the data, not the other way around. Therefore independent thinking and analysis is essential for successful scientific data interpretation. Furthermore, the mechanical teaching encouraged by the national curriculum has vastly increased error and fallacy in the scientific content of school courses. The contradictions contained in course content is off-putting to students who cannot understand ideas which in any case are sometimes wrong and no debate is allowed in a mechanical world view in which science is always 'correct'. This is a turn off to students used to debate in subjects like sociology and religion (believe it or not!).
The general politicisation of society has also affected prospective students who, whilst interested in science, see it as part of a whole and want answers to global problems like hunger and global warming. In general science courses do not address the political issues which could make them more interesting to students. There is also a prevalent view amongst older scientists that 'politics' and 'science' do not mix and that scientists expressing political opinions are somehow compromising their scientific 'independence'; however this is changing, driven especially by global issues.
In summary, I argue that all universities need basic science departments such as chemistry, physics and mathematics. 'General' science is no substitute for the intellectual discipline, theory and materialism of a basic science. Here the idea of emergence is important. All material objects obey the laws of physics, but chemical laws cannot be derived from physics, biochemistry cannot be derived from chemistry, biology cannot be derived from biochemistry, the laws of human society cannot be derived from biology. I argue that all the sciences at the higher levels of complexity require scientists with some kind of grounding in the sciences at a lower level and that the absence of experts in these sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) leads to error and fallacy in those sciences for which students and research are still in demand from industry (biochemistry - pharmaceuticals; biology, medicine - bio-technology). In addition, these disciplines are an essential part of the culture of today's society and deserve to be understood far more widely than they are. Science needs to break out of its 'elitist' laager and become an integrated part of discourse throughout society. Everyone is a scientist and general scientific debate is not taken anything like seriously enough. Scientists themselves need to engage much more widely with the media and the public. That is the academic argument. Politically I oppose the closure of departments in any case under the current conditions where philistine monetary and ideological considerations take precedence over academic considerations, the needs of staff and the needs of students.
Malcolm Povey
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