Perpetual Motion Machines and the Goldbach Conjecture / by Tian Song

《Perpetual Motion Machines and Goldbach’s Conjecture》By Tian Song, Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2003.11

The most striking manifestation of the current public lack of scientific literacy is how readily people “believe” things; the core of the scientific spirit lies in “doubt”! But I often do not like to bring up this word, because advocating a spirit of “doubt” often leads to misunderstandings. For example, the abuse of doubt. Tian Song’s little book *Perpetual Motion Machines and Goldbach’s Conjecture: Science in the Jianghu* offers many other forms of misunderstanding the scientific spirit—namely, pseudoscience. The prevalence of pseudoscience is also closely related to the direction of public opinion in society. Society has overpromoted things like “where there is a will, there is a way,” “a不起眼的小角色取得大成就” [“an inconspicuous nobody achieves great success”], “new insights are always looked down upon at the beginning,” and “revolutionary change is always easy to meet with attack and persecution”; the media, without discrimination, has extended harmful sympathy to pseudoscientists who engage in assiduous “research” but are not recognized by the academic world. The media and the public generally do not understand what scientific research actually is, and pseudoscientists pay not the slightest heed to the experimental method in scientific research either, completely distorting science’s “spirit of doubt”—they apply doubt to denying ironclad experimental results and scientific theories that, though not absolute truth, are sufficiently profound for the present; they apply doubt to interpreting the academic world’s contempt for them as the tragic persecution suffered by little people… Some people may say: among the thousands upon thousands of people who confidently claim to have solved Goldbach’s conjecture, perhaps one really has done it; this possibility cannot be ruled out. In fact, dealing with this question is similar to dealing with reports of supernatural phenomena, alien abductions, or extraordinary human abilities. Indeed, if those self-assured “discoverers” completely disregard science, and the process by which their “discovery” arises is from the very start contrary to scientific attitudes, then those matters need not be taken seriously from the outset! Perhaps a small number of such reports are worth testing, but those worth testing must be scientific—that is, scientific theories must be capable of accepting experiment and doubt. Pseudoscientists, however, disregard the established achievements of the scientific world (in fact, they often do not have enough of a scientific foundation to understand them), yet refuse others’ questioning of their “new theories” (blindly confident in themselves, they all become “invincible”); it can be said that they have completely reversed the scientific spirit of doubt. … Here I am reminded that when we study philosophy, we too should pay attention to similar issues—philosophy most values “critique” (which can also be said to be “doubt”), but what counts as a genuine critical spirit? That is a question that must be carefully thought through. 

July 23, 2005

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.