SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE !
Part 3 : Science in the Machine Age
Science begins with new discovery, sometimes through intentional enquiry, often quite by accident. Such new discovery must be analysed through synthesis with existing knowledge in the same and in connected fields, and the resulting analysis must in turn be synthesised into new theory. Finally, this new theory must be tested by experiment to establish the objectivity of truth. Clearly both theoretical and practical work are involved in such a process, and it follows from this that science and technique, (in the sense of the technique generally in use in a given society, in particular the technique of production), form a unity. New technique makes new science possible, and new science improves technique. If the total creative effort of society were an iceberg science would be its tip and at its base we would find the pick and shovel, and neither tip nor base could exist without its opposite. The higher the level of technique in any given society, the higher the level of its general culture, the greater is the possibility for new discovery and the faster the rate at which it occurs, and together with this, the better are the conditions for its analysis and synthesis into new theory and for experimental verification. The coming of the machine age was a bonanza for science.
After a protracted period of conflict between ethnic groups Europe entered a period of relative stability by about the tenth century A.D. Populations began to expand and city and nation states began to take form on the basis of agricultural economy, although in a very fluid way. The wisdom of the ancient world had not been entirely lost. Latin was the language of church, state and academia, and Roman law informed social relations. Starting in the twelfth century the hitherto unknown Greek tradition penetrated Europe by way of the Arabic incursion into the Iberian peninsular, with translations of the works of Aristotle on physics, astronomy and metaphysics. However, this did not take place in a vacuum; the Greek tradition was in substance materialist and secular, but Europe was dominated by the idealist religious outlook of Christianity. The struggle between the secular and the holy took the form of continual conflict between the kings of Europe and the Pope in Rome. To appease Christianity the translations had to be purged of their materialist content and distorted to conform to the Christian concept of God and the individual soul, a task that fell to Thomas Aquinas, (1225-1274).
By the middle of the fifteenth century there were sixty universities across Europe and communication between them was made possible by the common use of the Latin language. The Greek classics were read in the original language and scholars regarded their work as the rebirth of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, hence the term “renaissance” was coined. The materialism contained in these old traditions was reborn in the thought of Lorenzo Valla of Rome, (1405-57), and Marsilio Ficino of Florence, (1433-99), the first of the humanists, a tendency which takes the individual as its starting point and seeks to raise man and society to their full potential. While they remained practicing Christians their humanism challenged the old religious dogma of Rome, and Protestantism, the Christianity of the bourgeois age, found its first beginnings. The coming into being of the bourgeoisie as a class coincided with the beginning of the machine age.
Virtually all the great scientists of antiquity that we know of were Christians and consequently much scientific endeavour was devoted to the substantiation of religious belief. Science was seen not so much as enquiry into the nature of matter and the universe as enquiry into the will of God. The Pope presided over astronomical research which was largely confined to the production of a more accurate calendar for calculation of significant religious dates. However, as knowledge and understanding of nature increased so too did the materialist outlook. The conflict between idealism and materialism took the form of persecution of scientists such as Galileo and in 1696 Parliament passed an act making it a criminal offence to deny the divinity of Christ.
But science relentlessly pointed human knowledge in a different direction. Galileo famously conducted experiments which involved the release of weights from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and from this the law of gravity was abstracted. He concluded that any weight accelerates towards the centre of the earth at the rate of 32.2 feet per second squared, ignoring air resistance. Newton developed this into his universal law of inertia and gravitation which he published under the title of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, which explained not only the behaviour of bodies on Earth, but also that of the observable celestial bodies. The laws of nature could henceforth be expressed in the language of mathematics in a qualitatively more profound way than was achieved by Greek scholars such a Pythagoras, particularly with the advent of the infinitesimal calculus which is credited to Leibniz and Newton, since this method deals with variable rather than fixed quantities. Science now had its own language, and a powerful one at that, and with this science became, as it were, conscious of itself. The science of the Greeks, science “in-itself”, became science “for-itself”, the true science of the machine age.
It is only possible here to paint the rise of technology and science in the machine age with broad strokes of the brush. It is no surprise that since such progress sprang from an agricultural economy the first real machine was the watermill used for milling flower. The Domesday Book lists 7,500 watermills and the first record of a windmill is dated to the year 1185, and these were real machines, since they harnessed the kinetic energy of moving masses of water or air and transmitted it through a crude system of gears to perform work. The result was an enormous increase in productivity which transformed society from the bottom up since it became possible to support a class of workers by brain rather than hand, and scientific enquiry could be pursued on a sounder basis.
The era of classical physics opened with the work of William Gilbert, (1544-1603). He experimented with bar magnets which were needed for nautical compasses and asserted that the earth spun on its vertical axis. His published work was to some extent confirmation of Copernicus’ model of the universe, and it laid the basis for the great advances made by Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. The study of electricity began in earnest when Otto von Guericke, (1602-1686), built the first machine to generate static electricity and demonstrated that like charges repel. This early piece of scientific equipment became the basis of many experiments. In 1800 Alessandro Volta, (1745-1827), demonstrated his “voltaic pile”, which consisted of a pile of alternate zinc and silver discs separated by a salt water electrolyte, an arrangement which resulted in an electrical potential difference between its ends. The next great step was to establish the relation between electricity and magnetism, and this was begun by Andre Ampere, (1775-1836), continued by Hans Christian Oersted who discovered electro-magnetism in 1820, and by Faraday who discovered electro-magnetic induction in 1831.
This last was a truly great leap since it is the principle upon which electric motors work which, in conjunction with power stations which still rely on steam generation, and the national grid, turn just about every wheel in science, industry, and the home. Simultaneously with these advances in electro-magnetic theory there were advances in mechanical engineering technique. William Gilbert was the first to demonstrate the effect of atmospheric pressure on a piston in a cylinder, the principle upon which Newcomen based the first steam engine in 1712. Actually, Newcomen’s engine is best described as an atmospheric engine, it was James Watt who patented the first true steam engine in 1769 and it was a huge improvement in terms of power output and thermal efficiency. Mathew Boulton, the Birmingham manufacturer, began production of these engines but at first it was not possible to bore the cylinders with sufficient accuracy with currently available machines tools. The problem was solved by John Wilkinson, an iron master, who developed a new kind of boring machine and the steam age was born.
Without doubt this was the greatest leap forward in the technique of production in history since for the first time unlimited mechanical energy became available and at the same it time prepared the way for great scientific advance. The steam engine is an exercise in the transformation of energy, from chemical energy to heat, and from this to mechanical, (kinetic), energy. The investigation of energy as such began in earnest. Since up to this point the horse had been the main source of mechanical energy it was necessary to establish the power output of the steam engine compared to that of a horse. James Watt set horses to work raising weights and established the standard measure of one horse-power at 33,000 foot/pounds per minute. In 1843 Joule conducted experiments which established the relationship between heat and mechanical work, one calorie being equal to 772 foot/pounds, and the relation between mechanical and electrical power, one horsepower being equivalent to 746 watts. The heat energy potential of chemicals, their calorific value, can be calculated if their composition is known since combustion is the synthesis of carbon and oxygen which produces heat, and this in turn can be expressed as mechanical or electrical energy.
With the synthesis of mechanical and electrical science in industry the machine age was complete and scientific equipment of unheard of scale and complexity could be produced, such as the electric light in 1809, the spectroscope in 1814, the microphone in 1827, the dynamo 1n 1830 and the equipment used by J. J. Thompson to investigate electrical discharges in various gasses. The device he used gave us the cathode ray tube which is the basis of the oscilloscope, an piece of equipment essential to almost every branch of science and technology, not to mention its use as the TV screen and computer monitor. In 1897 he discovered the electron and science was transformed. The classical era was over and the modern era of serious study of the nature of matter and the universe had begun. The equipment provided by industry for space observation gave us Einstein’s relativity and equipment such as the cyclotron gave us quantum mechanics.
However, what science has so far not given us is a solution to global warming, a cure for AIDS, or food for the millions who are starving, and a host of other seemingly intractable problems. Or are they so intractable? Is science unable to provide the desperately needed answers, or are such questions simply not being addressed? How does society as a whole direct scientific enquiry and how does it interpret and make use of new knowledge? Up to the present all scientific endeavour has been directed to the world of inorganic matter, and to the organic world of fauna and flora, but in order to answer these questions we must focus our scientific work on human society and on human thought itself. We proceed next to the latter question, which takes us beyond the realm of exact science and into the realm of philosophy.
In Part I we contrasted the two main trends in philosophy, the materialist, which holds that matter, the universe, the world external to thought, exists independently of mankind and thought is a reflection of it, and its opposite, idealism, which holds that thought is primary to matter and the universe. The first serious enquiry into this world external to thought was that of the ancient Greeks. The earlier great thinkers, such as Anaxagoras, Hereclitus and Democritus, took nature as they found it and adopted the materialist outlook as a matter of course, and only later, when a body of knowledge had been accumulated and the habit of speculative thought became firmly established, the idea of the primacy of thought over matter took root in the thinking of those such as Pythagoras or Plato. It is well established that Christianity has its roots in this later Greek philosophy; such concepts as that of the immortal soul can be traced back to this time, and the renaissance of Greek thought in Europe found society dominated by Christian idealism. Further, society was by now differentiated into classes, a ruling elite of workers by brain and a subordinate class of workers by hand, and idealism, the mode of thought peculiar to the ruling elite, workers by brain, had become the dominant philosophy, mostly in the form of Christian religion. In this respect the idealist outlook was most clearly expressed by the English theologist Bishop George Berkeley, (1685-1753), who, denying the existence of the external world altogether, wrote "You may, if it shall seem good, use the word 'matter' in the same way as other men use the word 'nothing'" (Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.)
As a result science became dominated by the idealist method which found expression in the work of such men as French philosopher Auguste Compte, (1798-1857), and of the English philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. They developed the outlook known as positivism, by which they meant that thought could not go beyond the data provided by empirical science, and that the human mind could never penetrate to grasp the essence of things in the objective external world beyond thought. This was the first step on the slippery slope to outright idealism in science itself and it was not long before scientists such as the great chemist Wilhelm Ostwald embraced idealism. His view was that “The universal causal connection of phenomena is the last and best child of human knowledge; it is the universal law, the highest of those laws which, to express it in the words of a philosopher, human reason dictates to nature.” [Our emphasis.]
In spite of all this the materialist approach was continually re-affirmed by science for the simple reason that science is the struggle to understand the external world, and that can be nothing but a process of allowing thought to reflect it, and moreover this holds just as good for the universal law governed interconnections between things as it does for the things we perceive themselves. However, to make matters worse, the dialectical logic of the Greek tradition, epitomised by Hereclitus, was also lost so that formal, metaphysical logic became dominant in scientific thought, as Engels explains:-
"Real natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms - these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left us a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century." (F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
But just as science continually reaffirms the materialist view that the external world exists independently of our sensation and thought, so it also shows that the causal, (contradictory), connections between things and phenomena are objective along with the things that exist. It is nature that dictates to thought, not vice versa, and this means that the law governed motion of material things must also be reflected by thought in the form of logic. Darwin’s theory of evolution, expounded in The Origin of Species published in 1859, was powerful confirmation of this, and most importantly it was this theory that put dialectical logic firmly back on the scientific agenda. Engels goes on:-
"Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic things, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. But the naturalists who have learned to think dialectically are few and far between, and this conflict of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike." (Op. Cit.)
Darwin's theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest were a devastating blow to creationist ideology. The rabid reaction of the creationists is legendary, and for a while they enjoyed considerable success since while Darwin was able to explain the causes of change and development in flora and fauna he could not account for the preservation of the old in the new, the hereditary side of the process. However, important work in this respect was being carried out at the very same time by Gregor Johann Mendel, (1822-1884), an Austrian monk who came from a farming background, who experimented with plants to reveal the hereditary process and published his work in 1866. He advanced the concept of “hereditary units” and coined the terms “dominant” for a trait which showed up in an offspring, and “recessive” for a trait masked by a dominant unit, thereby laying the basis for the discovery of the gene. Unfortunately his work received no attention and his papers were destroyed when he died, and although his work was re-discovered in 1900 it was not till the 1920’s that its true significance with respect to Darwin’s theory was understood. The logical unity of the two theories became known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis and it placed the theory of evolution on a sound scientific basis. But it did much more than that.
The new theory strongly indicated the relation between organic and inorganic matter, later to be confirmed with the discovery of DNA. With the discovery of this link a still greater truth is revealed, the link between thought and matter. Since thought is the function of the human brain, which is the result of evolution beginning with inorganic matter, thought is at last seen as nothing but the highest firm of the motion of matter. In man, nature itself thinks, and for the correct materialist reflection of the objective, external world, thought must be dialectical. Things must be grasped in their contradictory relations and the transition of each thing into its own opposite must be understood. Most scientists today would understand the formula for water, H.2.O, as a fixed relation between the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. In dialectical thought the formula is understood not as a fixed relation by as the law of motion by which water comes into being and passes away. Water comes into being when and where this condition is met, and passes away when it ceases to be met, and it is a universal law of nature, because since the universe is infinite water must exist somewhere in every moment.
Once we accept Ostwald’s view, (as outlined above), we are free to rearrange the world in thought according to our subjective wishes. With this kind of thinking philosophy remains unscientific and the sciences interact with the subjective idealist ideology which dominates social consciousness, thus transforming practical science from a force for progress into a reactionary, destructive force. The dominant subjective wish in the social consciousness of present society, which determines all human relations and activity in the fields of production, technology and science is the wish for profit on invested capital, hence all scientific data is subjectively re-arranged to create a picture of the world to justify this wish. The fact that many, even some of the greatest scientists, while they proceed materialistically in the course of their work, nonetheless interpret the world according to the method of idealism, is a fatal flaw that threatens disaster for mankind.
Thus, in the face of overwhelming proof of the catastrophic effects of carbon fuel emissions scientists such a Professor Phillip Stott of the University of London can be found who are prepared to utter such banalities as “In the last month alone, serious scientific studies have undermined the whole basis of these predictions, with the temperatures over the oceans seen as exaggerated by up to 40% and the very relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature questioned.” With such “science” as this in his back pocket President Bush has been able to construct a whole government of representatives of the oil and automotive industries, put leaders of such industry in charge of negotiations on the Kyoto agreement, and state smugly that “We will not do anything which harms our economy.”
Further, all scientific enquiry is subordinated to the fulfilment of the subjective wish for profit. The main driving force behind scientific enquiry today is venture capital, as epitomised by such dubious organisations as Cambridge Research and Innovation Ltd., whose stated policy is to invest in situations where:-
Specific applications for the technology exist or can be envisaged, and the technology so applied produces products which can have significant advantages over other products.
The technology is, or can be protected by patent, design registration or copyright.
The technology has potential to address large, possibly global markets.
The innovators concerned have the vision, commitment and professional attitude necessary to see their technology through to commercially viable products.
Here the social desirability of a product and its polluting effect are entirely left out of the equation, only profit matters. It is in the field of government financed projects where science is prostituted to its most degraded level, particularly in the name of “defence”. Here we are first reminded of the World War II Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons and the subsequent subordination of so called peaceful uses of nuclear fission and fusion to produce plutonium for bombs, and with that the utter disregard for the accumulation of toxic waste or any means for its safe disposal. We may also mention the government’s chemical weapons programme at Porton Down where, over the past eighty years 25,000 people have been used as guinea pigs to test these vile products, several of whom have died horribly as a result. Further, the government’s utter disregard for the environment is revealed in a report published by the independent think tank New Economics Foundation on 17th. February 2003. The report shows that Britain’s universities support about 1000 projects worth 67 million pounds each year for the oil and gas industries, 60% of which are government funded. In many other fields the government has simply privatised scientific research so that new discoveries immediately take the form of private property to be traded as commodities on the market.
Finally, a recent Ministry of Defence report reveals that the governments response to global warming is not so much a crash programme of scientific work to find a solution as to prepare to fight wars over water resources and land as vast areas are flooded due to storms of unprecedented force and the rise in sea level, war of the haves on the have nots, wars of the polluters on the polluted. Such nihilism beggars belief. We hope we have convinced the reader that for so long as science remains the hand-maiden of the profit system and global capitalism the future for humanity is bleak indeed. Science must be made to serve the people, not profit, and that is immediately a political question. The structure of society must be transformed in such a way that all scientific and productive processes are directly controlled by the people, and that can only become reality through the public ownership of industry and social direction of all scientific endeavour. If the human race has a future, it is a socialist one.
Terry Button
First written 2001, rewritten 2007