Discover, Predict, Reproduce… Science

 

Science is often seen as the locus of Discovery, the place and people where concepts, effects and things never recorded before come into being or at least knowledge.

The term ‘Discover’ seems to suggest that these novelties were somehow already there but ‘covered’, not separated from already known reality from which it was not yet isolated and reduced to this exact piece going to be characterized, hence the customary practice of reduction in Science.

The value of the then ‘new’ stuff is to be cognized and recognized, categorized as extended in or rather with space and time, or space with time known as space-time, found elsewhere and elsewhen with efficience, effectively, in effect.

This means a model, pattern or language, often used as synonymous although only modes of access to knowledge, and process to operate it. They dictate the places and conditions where and when the occurrence, example, case of the category, or object in or as effect is to be found or produced again, hence re-produced from what was therefore a pre-diction.

All this is well known about Science but the following consideration requires attention: how will Science re-produce what has never been produced, predict what has never been dictated, discover what does not seem to be even covered?

This question is not merely philosophical: everyone would like to predict the future but if the future is not the reproduction of the past, then the value is precisely in what makes the difference between both, in a space of still possibles, or potentials even beyond refutable, that modern, ‘developed’, in the sense of technological, applied science civilization,  seems particularly prone to isolate and circumscribe and, from such writing and recipe, only thereafter may come to predict as reproducible.

Reproduction therefore characterizes technology and industry rather than science per say and it is the efficiency of the systematic and ultimately ubiquitous reproduction in space and time that enable them to validate science by repulsing its quest for bits, cases, occurrences of refutation, of ill-reproduction, from where science will discover again.

As a conclusion there is a conflict, beyond the apparent time opposition, between predicting the past, which is what science applies to do and to test through technological and industrial ever more efficient reproduction where it says that some pattern and processed effect in a result will make a past go on, be re-produced (hence as past) and keep consistency into the unknown that we call the future.

This has applications and implications at all scales of course and particularly at the diverse edges of the universe, called its cosmology, where the limited consistency of the past, but at least preserved into what we call the present, get patterns such as discussed in our previous blog pages such as Dimensional Consequences 1, Cosmological introduction, Know the Future, Cosmological Constant issue (abstract), Cosmological Coincidence (abstract).

Back to earth, or rather to immediate next steps since earth might dwell some edges of the universe after all,  such as ourselves, the practical conflict is about predicting the apparently unpredictable, that is to say the future inasmuch as never seen, never made and possibly never to come into actuality or even thought before long, even unthinkable and yet, as we can observe, always happening!

Science Fiction, that was sometimes called anticipation – a term not foreign to the concept of prediction – is one place where this kind of future is eventually found although its most common location is university, where researchers are typically invited to output a Science that would not be fiction, or not anymore.

A conjecture developed by the author these last decades, among others, is that of quite deterministic a future in the sense that the Fiction (assumed scientific) so imagined, shaped and, if this means more precisely… modeled, must be consistent with the aggregated past into ongoing present and further future to which it, therefore, adds more integrated consistency hence complexity, as we see in order to become and make the real.

This suggests ways to determine this particular future that we have characterized above as non-determinable, non-predictable and non reproducing the past but on the contrary introducing a never met piece of the new reality… unless the determinism is such from some point in the future rather than from any point from the past, from where it would be non-deterministic. However these points in the future exist, they are for instance these fictions, including all the scientific models – such as the 10^500 string theories model or variants mentioned by Smolin – mentioned above.

Finally this is where we have come to propose the project now known as REVUER, cf.On the REVUER project, toward a ‘General Predictability’, where we anticipate that many paths from, to and through more or less reproducible pieces will cross, leave or join others to better producible, novel, future and only thereafter possibly re-producible future past in it.

This explains the importance of the protocol and organization upon which the REVUER global experiment must be able to rely to these horizons, as discussed in next blog pages.