Tian Song: *Don Quixote’s Lance—Passing Through the Mist of Scientific Discourse*, Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, December 2002
Preface:
“Misunderstanding Science,” included in the first part on page xiv, is a work from the early 1990s. Looking at it now, there are many lines that make me inwardly embarrassed, for example: ………… these are things I would absolutely not dare to write now. One could add a few lines of mine that I often use to satirize others: fearing that others will say one lacks learning, one has no choice but to pretend to have learning, only to prove in the end that one lacks learning.……
////——That satire is really interesting; in fact, when I write articles, I often—knowingly or unknowingly—commit this kind of fault as well.
“Absolutely Correct”:
Page 1
Believers who have never re-examined the standards by which they judge themselves often tend to think that they possess absolute knowledge. At such times they develop a sort of arrogance, believing themselves to be absolutely correct, and therefore they often use words like “ignorant,” “wrong,” and “absurd” to describe people who are different from themselves. They mock the obvious beliefs of others without realizing that they too are believing.Page 5
……However, the objection to Copernicus concerning the fall of a body from a tower raised by Ptolemy still could not be answered very well; it had to wait until Galileo had worked out the principle of inertia and the principle of relativity before it could be explained in heliocentric terms.…… Kepler used only seven ellipses to explain all the phenomena that Copernicus explained with 48 circles and Ptolemy with 80 circles, and achieved higher precision; those seven ellipses could in turn be condensed into three laws.Page 6 Believers are often more fanatical than prophets; this also holds true for believers in science.
////——I strongly agree.
Page 7 Einstein said to Tagore: “I cannot prove that my view is right, but this is indeed my religion.” (*Collected Works of Einstein*, Commercial Press, vol. 1, p. 270)
Page 7
At the most fundamental level, science is linked once again with religion: both require faith. But religious faith can at times become fanatical and irrational—if you blaspheme me, I will burn you. Scientific rationality, by contrast, tells scientists that since both are faith, since neither can be proven, one cannot say that my faith is superior to yours. Logically, answering “yes” and answering “no” are not distinguished by any superiority or inferiority. Therefore scientific faith is tolerant: while holding fast to its own faith, it also respects the faith held fast by others. Einstein and Bohr argued for decades, always confronting each other with rational intelligence; in the words of the physicist Wheeler: “It is difficult in the past few centuries to find any other precedent comparable to this debate, which took place between two such great men, over such a long period of time, involving such profound questions, and yet within such a sincere friendship.” Neither of these two masters believed they possessed absolute knowledge. Yet we can see that the supporters on both sides—especially those outside the physics community—often repeat their positions in an absolutist tone.
////——It is quite obvious that Tian Song’s view that “science requires faith at the most fundamental level” and his advocacy of tolerance are both things I “strongly” agree with. However, here Tian Song also has some problems in expressing the tolerant spirit of science, and he himself is aware of them, as shown by the question he raises at the end of the section: “By what right do we say that science possesses a rational spirit of tolerance and skepticism?” (p. 8)
Page 8 We respect another kind of faith, but that does not mean we must accept that kind of faith and knowledge.
////——Strongly agree.
“Scientific Roast Chicken and Socrates”:
Page 13
The success of science over several hundred years has turned science into an all-powerful god. To people today, all its miracles seem natural and unsurprising. People may not necessarily understand science, but they all trust science. Now almost every farmer who once habitually used manure and wood ash will not doubt the miraculous efficacy of chemical fertilizer. Even though he does not understand the specific chemical details, he will say: that’s science! The fertilizer seller also does not understand the chemical details, but he can likewise say to the farmer without the slightest hesitation: this is science!—even if what he is selling is fake fertilizer. In all kinds of public discourse, science is an incomparable big word; whatever it may be, so long as it is labeled “science,” it can be coated with a layer of radiance. I once went to a roast chicken shop where the wrapping paper boldly printed slogans about how traditional recipes combined with modern science make the roast chicken more nutritious, along with a nutrition table explaining how many grams of carbon, how many grams of calcium, and how many grams of calcium carbonate each 1,000 grams of chicken contains, leaving me unsure whether this was food or medicine—in any case, the thing scared me; I bought one, but I could not tell what was so delicious about it.
////——Turning “science” into a label is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, “green food”: people are often not clear about what the standards for green food actually are, but in any case green food is always a good thing. The key lies in our needing a healthy mechanism to ensure as much as possible that things labeled “green food” are worthy of the name; it is not necessary to first popularize the details of green food certification among the public. This is not to say that “science” cannot be used as a keyword meaning “good,” but the key is to see clearly the distinction between appearance and essence—the appearance is the proliferation and deification of “science,” while the essence precisely shows the extreme poverty of the public’s understanding of science.
“Random Thoughts on the Spirit of Science”
Page 16
Mr. Fan Hongye’s remarks gave me much inspiration. At the beginning, Mr. Fan quoted a foreign scholar as saying: “In a country where the people are generally patriotic, patriotic movements seldom occur.” According to this logic, the fact that China now advocates the spirit of science and promotes the spirit of science would seem to indicate that China currently does not have a spirit of science, or at least lacks one. Thinking back to how, a few years ago, the academic world had widely discussed the loss of the Chinese humanistic spirit, one finds that we have neither a humanistic spirit nor a spirit of science. In Liu Huajie’s words, there is not a bit of spirit to be had.
////——“There is not a bit of spirit to be had.”……汗～～
Page 17
I asked myself: “By what right do we say that science possesses a rational spirit of tolerance and skepticism?” Liu Huajie answered that science is mainly about logical consistency and empirical verification. Rationality is necessarily included within the spirit of science; tolerance is not. Skepticism is even less something unique to science.
////——Personally, I lean more toward Teacher Liu Huajie’s answer: rationality is necessarily included within the spirit of science. Some postmodern or relativist thinkers have gone too far in advocating a re-enchantment of science, trying to bring irrationality into science itself; that would be overcorrection. Saying that tolerance and skepticism are part of the spirit of science seems to make “science” so vast that all good qualities can be folded into it. This is a good thing in popular science and science communication, but theoretically it does not seem rigorous enough. It is certainly possible to find many cases showing that science demands “tolerance,” but there are also many cases showing science to be domineering; and saying that science demands “skepticism” can easily lead people to overlook that science also very much needs trust and acceptance. Therefore, rather than having the broad category of “the spirit of science” subsume tolerance, skepticism, and so on, it would be better to list tolerance and skepticism separately and advocate them as such. In addition to science needing tolerance and skepticism, philosophy, religion, and so forth also need tolerance and skepticism. Religion perhaps does not directly include tolerance and skepticism—indeed, the spirit of skepticism seems opposed to the spirit of faith in religion—yet religion also needs to advocate tolerance and allow skepticism. Of course, the object of faith cannot be subjected to doubt.
Page 17
I think many people have this mentality: they hope that the things they like possess all the qualities they like. For example, sports fans take good words such as fairness and struggle and call them the Olympic spirit, while excluding the bad word “barbarism.” Although barbarism in sports is obvious, plain for all to see, they will say this is not normal, that it is accidental, peripheral, will eventually disappear, and therefore is not spirit and need not be considered. Likewise, scientism also likes to attach good qualities to science. I am not a scientism advocate, but on the whole I still think science is a good thing. And I think tolerance and skepticism are also good things, so I hope that the spirit of science “ought” to possess these qualities. Under this view, I will subconsciously argue—and can argue—that the spirit of science possesses the tolerance and skepticism that I like. But if there really is something called the “spirit of science,” does it really already possess those qualities I like?
////——Tian Song is very good at self-reflection; here he himself has already become aware of the presuppositions in his argument, and later in the essay he goes on to further discuss what the spirit of science “is.” As for this question, however, I think the sports fan’s inclusion of “fairness” and “struggle” in the Olympic spirit while excluding “barbarism,” “violence,” and so on is not unreasonable, because when we speak of the “spirit of sports,” what we are really saying is what kind of qualities sports ought to have, rather than objectively examining and summing up the general laws of specific sporting activities. As Tian Song also says: people engaged in scientific activity, people who have made contributions to the scientific enterprise, do not necessarily possess the spirit of science. We should note that what we are asking is “what is the spirit of science,” not “what are scientific activities like,” so the answer to this question does not need to be wholly objective or descriptive; answering with “it should be” is not beside the point.
“How Can the Qi People Stop Worrying About the Sky”:
http://www.gmw.cn/01ds/1999-04/14/GB/245^DS1204.htm
Page 39: A person who wants to understand the universe he inhabits, to understand the world in which he lives, is responding to a psychological need that inevitably arises after human beings attain self-awareness. Driven by this psychological need, people turn their gaze to the starry sky that inspired Kant’s awe and put forward some conjectures about the cosmos; this is the most primitive worldview. Every primitive people has its own worldview. To us today, these worldviews are absurd myths, but they were the earliest reflections of primitive humans on the cosmos. Ancient Greek thinkers continued this reflection; their reflections became what we today call natural philosophy—the ideological source of modern science.
From today’s perspective, the man from Qi is very much like the ordinary people of today. On major cosmic questions such as cosmology, he believes in authority, such as philosophers or scientists; he develops the psychological impulse to ponder the cosmos, yet he himself does not put forward much thought, and with a few words from the authority figure he is persuaded, though lingering doubts remain, he does not pursue them further. Long Luzi is very much like an authority figure; in explaining this question he is roughly equivalent to a natural philosopher. He puts forward some assumptions about the composition of heaven and earth, and also some views on the evolution of things. As for Liezi, he has something of a positivist philosopher’s flavor, refusing to discuss things he does not know. Honest!
////——Modern science has made “the man from Qi worrying about the sky” into a new problem (or rather, generated a new form of expression for it). So what answers will the modern versions of the “explainer,” “Long Luzi,” and “Liezi” give to this?
“Waving Don Quixote’s Lance—Reading Wu Guosheng’s *Reflections on Modernization*”:
http://fzs.cupl.edu.cn/scholar/wugsh/shuping.htm#1
Page 43
After the earth loses its mystery, the organic soil will become an inorganic desert, losing its ability to give birth to life. Human relations too become a collection of grains of sand: they can be molded, they can be replaced. The meaning of existence is no longer existence itself; people, driven by the technological age, constantly obtain certain quantified symbols from the outside world, such as dollars, or certificates. Happiness, like a deity, has no place in the sky of the technological age. And people often think that the quantified symbols they have obtained are happiness. Many science-fiction novels depict a war that will take place in the future between human beings and robots; I do not think such a thing will really happen. What will truly happen is that human beings themselves will become machines and become part of technology. The problem of the future is not whether happiness can be attained, but that we have already lost the ability to feel happiness. And even more frightening is that for future people, this is not even a problem.
Amid dense gunfire, birds are destined to fall to the ground. The great hand of technology will eventually erase all differences and push the world into the apocalypse of maximum entropy. As for the future, I always take a pessimistic attitude, just as a person is destined to grow old and destined to die. To block this trend is like Don Quixote waving his lance before the windmills. Imagining this scene, I do not find it at all ludicrous; I only find it tragic and magnificent. An aging person also divides into new cells every day, and however active these new cells may be, however sustainable their development may be, they cannot stop the aging of the organism as a whole. Once a new cell is born in the body of the old, its tragedy is already inescapable.
Wu Guosheng is not unaware of this. In his Peking University classroom, Professor Wu Guosheng clearly articulated a latent law of the technological age: if something is technologically feasible, then it is something that should be done. Put another way, if something can appear, then it must appear. Thus, whether it is the atomic bomb or human cloning, once the technological capability is sufficient, no force can stop them; humanity’s Eve cannot refuse the temptation of the ripe fruit of technology—even if there is God’s warning, so what? Besides, God is already dead. A student asked whether we can still do anything. Professor Wu pondered for a moment and said: “There is always some hope, I suppose!” It did not sound very confident.
……
But the final hope may lie in this: even if there is no hope at all, the new cells must still wave their lance unremittingly, Don Quixote’s lance.
////——“There is always some hope, I suppose!”——I deeply share this somewhat “tragic and magnificent” mood, though on the whole I am an optimist. The main force that can make me optimistic lies only in my acceptance of “religion.” The best answerer to the question “What may I hope for?” has always been religion. Even if the personalized God has “died,” religion will not die, nor will the hope of immortality and eternity.
“Guarding Science while Touching the Humanities—On Liu Bing and His Two Newly Published Books”:
http://www.oursci.org/lib/review/028.htm
Recently, Comrade Liu Bing has suddenly come out with two volumes of collected essays; there have been symposiums, there have been press Q&As, and he has thus acquired a dark face flushed with red, graceful in bearing; full of charm, radiant and splendid. It makes me jealous.
But the book titles are a little strange: one is *Garrisoning the Margins* (Qingdao Publishing House), the other *Touching Science* (Fujian Education Publishing House). It sounds as if Liu Bing is an engineer corpsman, crawling forward from a marginal stronghold and sneaking about on the borders of science looking for treasure. Calling oneself “marginal” has something of a wronged-woman tone, and Liu Bing himself also felt that there was a problem with putting it that way, so in the preface he explained himself: he studied physics at university, and although in the 1980s he was in the fashionable center of “Study math, physics, and chemistry well, and you can travel the whole world,” the economic tide of the 1990s pushed him to the margins; for graduate school he chose history of science, which was the margin of the margin; as for women and feminism, and the environment and environmental protection, which he loved, they had never become the center at all. This explanation, though seemingly reasonable, only makes his wronged-woman mentality more concrete: he ought to have been favored, so why is he still in the cold palace? The more he tries to explain it, the blacker it gets! As for *Touching Science*, it is just as baffling. After so many years working on science and its history, he is already inside science itself—so why is he still “touching” it from the outside? Isn’t that a bit too modest, with the suspicion of saying the opposite of what he means and of showing off? So these two books ought rather to be called *Garrisoning Science* and *Touching the Margins*—with the air of “living in a hired hand’s room while keeping an eye on the whole world.”
////——I don’t know how close Tian Song and Liu Bing are in private. If there is bad blood between them, then this piece seems a little too malicious; if they’re on good terms, then this joke seems a bit too fierce as well…
The Moon Shines on the Road of the Truth of Reality—Reading Notes
Pages 129~160
////——Tian Song wrote about nine excellent books here: *Art and Physics*, *What Is Scientific Truth?—Is the Moon There When No One Is Looking at It?*, *Black Holes and the Curvature of Spacetime: Einstein’s Ghost*, *The End of Certainty*, *Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty*, *The Amazing Hypothesis*, *The Terrible Symmetry—The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics*, *God and the New Physics*, and *Beyond Space and Time—A Scientific Journey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension*. Except for *Art and Physics*, they belong respectively to the First Push series and the Stone of Philosophy series, and I happen to have read all eight of those books (more precisely, I read part of *The End of Certainty* and *The Amazing Hypothesis*; the rest I read in full). All of the above titles are well worth recommending!
Page 161 Scientific knowledge is trustworthy not because it is absolutely correct truth, but because it is something everyone can personally verify.
Our opposition to trust in science does not mean that we have lost trust in science, but rather that we understand science more.
////——I strongly agree with the latter sentence. As for the former sentence, to say that science is something everyone can personally verify does not seem accurate. Can we all “personally verify” relativity, quantum theory, or the Big Bang theory? Of course, an important feature of science is precisely that it is verifiable and falsifiable. It is “verifiability,” not “personal verifiability,” that guarantees science is trustworthy. And the reason the public can trust science, on the one hand, also includes trust in authority; on the other hand, more importantly, it is trust in the “scientific methods” that produce scientific theories, and in the manner and attitude with which scientific conclusions are described.
*Manuscript Fees, Manuscript Fees; Indexes, Indexes*:
http://www.vankeweekly.com/vankebbs/printpage.asp?BoardID=6&ID=19697
In the afterword, Mr. Wang first briefly recounts his connection with Nash, his admiration for and knowledge of Nash, and believes that he was “the most suitable candidate” to translate this book (*The Princeton Cave of Emptiness* in the Stone of Philosophy series, later renamed *A Beautiful Mind*), so he gladly accepted the invitation from Shanghai Scientific and Educational Publishing House and got to work. But:
“More than a month later, when the contract text for the translation work finally arrived after passing through layer upon layer of procedures, I was really taken aback by how low the translation fee was. Over the years, I had never before had a journal or publishing department seek my translated writing at such a low ‘price,’ because qualified translation is work that tests one more severely than much qualified original writing.”
Mr. Wang’s words made me feel a shared indignation. Since the 1980s, China’s publishing industry has begun to introduce foreign books on a large scale, but the standard of translation has shown a tendency to decline with every passing day. As far as the reading matter I often read, now called science-and-culture books, I am already very satisfied if I can see a work that reaches the standard; if I see a translation I can give 80 points to, I practically want to burn incense for the translator. I have repeatedly put forward this fallacy: a qualified translator should at the same time possess several conditions—good foreign-language ability, good scientific literacy, good humanistic literacy, and good Chinese. Scanning across the translations of all the major series, I feel that translators who possess all of these conditions at once are as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. I myself happen to have a ready-made example of failing scientific literacy. In China Translation & Publishing Corporation’s “Science and Humanity Series,” there is *The Cosmos, Quantum, and the Human Brain*. One of the authors is Roger Penrose, the author of *The Emperor’s New Mind* (First Push series). Just by looking at the author and flipping through the illustrations, one can tell the original must be a good book, but before I had even finished the preface, by page XIII, problems had already appeared. The translator actually rendered the famous quantum-mechanical “wave function” as “wave function” 功能, so “wave-function collapse” became “wave-function function collapse.” On the same page, “the quantum gravity problem” was translated as “the quantum heavy-gravity problem,” and “Gödel’s theorem” became “Gau-de’er’s theorem.” I truly do not know how much time would be needed to translate these bizarre terms back into the terminology I am familiar with. It really made my confidence collapse, and I didn’t know whether I should keep reading.
////——To Mr. Wang Zeke ft&cmft; as for *The Cosmos, Quantum, and the Human Brain*… I bought that book too, along with “collapse”…
Pages 223~228 http://s109196612.onlinehome.us/column/002/4.html
*The Struggle over Scientific Discursive Power and Its Strategies*
http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/hps/viewarticle.php?sid=106
Pages 240~241
After two hours of discussion, the atmosphere on the floor grew lively. Since the representatives of the opposition had already made sufficiently full statements, my speech took a rather off-beat turn, pushing the pro side’s views to the extreme in order to show how absurd they were. I raised three questions. First, do animals have science? If having survival, and being able to solve clothing, food, shelter, and transportation, means having science, then do animals have science? Bees are able to build hives that, according to modern scientific calculations, obtain the greatest strength and the largest space with limited materials—does that mean bees understand science? Second, was there Buddhism or Buddhist thought in pre-Qin China? According to the usual view, Buddhism was introduced into China during the Han dynasty, and pre-Qin China was destined not to have Buddhism or its thought. But if one day, according to the statements of certain Buddhist people, Buddhism becomes a planetary religion on Earth, could we then interpret Laozi’s “wu” as “emptiness,” take Zhuangzi’s “unfettered wandering in accordance with the spontaneous course” as a precursor of Chan Buddhism, and prove that Buddhist thought existed in ancient China? If not, why can we so unhesitatingly extract portions of the writings of Mozi and say that they are ancient Chinese scientific thought? Third, why does saying that ancient China had science count as patriotism? Take Chinese medicine, for example: because it is skillful and effective, we say that it is science; but once we say it is science, then it should conform to the basic principles of science, so it must be regulated by scientific—namely Western medical—theories and methods. The result of this integration of Chinese and Western medicine is that now students graduating from Chinese medicine colleges can no longer take pulses. In the end, this will inevitably cause Chinese medicine to die out, leaving only Chinese herbal medicine to linger on in the Western medical system or flourish there. So even from the standpoint of loving traditional culture, I must firmly oppose saying that Chinese medicine is science.
My first question pointed out a common mistake of the pro side: confusing a skill with one’s understanding of that skill. Being able to use a crowbar does not necessarily mean one understands the principle of leverage. There is all the difference in the world between the two. Who would have thought that before I had even finished speaking, someone would decisively answer that animals too have science. This shows just how absurd the first definition is. Under this pan-scientific logic, perhaps even bacteria have science. If bacteria didn’t understand genetics, how could they replicate themselves so accurately?
The second question concerns mentality. Anything good must have come out of our own house, or at least be something our own house has. In dealing with the question of ancient Chinese science, this mentality also lurks there. At the same time, it also raises doubts about the method of forced analogical comparison.
The third question concerns strategy. In fact, like the pro side, I also want to say that my side is impressive; only the strategy is different. The pro side’s strategy is: the coolest thing in your house is also in our house; whereas my strategy is: that cool thing in your house we may not have, but our house has something else that is just as cool as your thing.
////——I basically agree. In fact, questions like whether ancient China had philosophy in the Western sense, or whether capitalism had embryonic forms, are all similar; there is no need to boost one’s own morale by saying that whatever the West has, ancient China also had. I also think Chinese traditional culture is something to be proud of, but precisely because it differs from Western models, it is even more worthy of pride and cherishing.
February 7, 2006
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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