Since many years my concern is the process of the fabrication of facts in science (that later on become facts integrated into everyday life). Biestmilch is as a complex substance that is located on the edge of science. To find out more about the mechanisms of action that may actually be responsible for the efficacy of biestmilch, I was forced to rethink state-of-the art knowledge and science respectively. Automatically, you come across questions of epistemology and methodology. You start to question facts, you try to go back in time and have a closer look on these facts when they have not been facts yet, but fantasy, ideas, assumptions or propositions.
Facts are like Pandora boxes, you open them and thousands of facts that lead to the one fact pop out. Implicitness dissolves, questions arise, new perspectives on well accepted facts evolve and demand reconsideration by science. Therefore a fact may turn into a fluffy creature, transform or disappear, maybe getting replaced by another one that undergoes the same destiny one day.
This is what happens to me all the time while working with biestmilch. Biestmilch provokes you to ask questions because it does not follow the established explanatory models.
Today, I came along a blog post that deals with this process of scientific facts production as well. Hasok Chang is a guy who opens the Pandora boxes. I find posts of this kind very rarely, therefore I picked it up. It shows that a fact is a fact only as long as you don’t start questioning it. Chang took the fact that water is boiling at 100°C back into his laboratory and looked at this fact without prejudice taking nothing for granted. And this is what he found out:Historical records from the 18th century show already that there was some confusion over the temperature. We all know that water boils at 100 °C, right? In fact, as engineers know, this isn’t the case. Chang set about experimenting for himself and found that the boiling temperature of water varies according to the material and shape of the vessel in which it is heated, the type of heat, and the amount of dissolved air in the water. He was astounded that most of us are completely unaware that the temperature at which water boils can vary by 9 °C, yet it is something most of us do on a daily basis.
Hasok Chang is professor of philosophy of science at University College London. He coined the work he is doing “complementary science”. I would rather prefer to call it the destruction and reconstruction of facts. Facts are the foundation of our view on the world, and our view on the world determines what has got the potential to develop into a fact – a circular process that never stops.
Generations have been brought up to believe that the science we are taught at school is fully explained, but in fact there are still exciting, unanswered questions out there in our everyday experience. Hasok Chang is challenging our self-conception.
Source: Short Sharp Science
