I’m the type of person who loves deriving from first-principles and one who admires people who like to do the same. This post goes in honour (British English, people – I come from an ex-colony) of the Mythbusters.
To figure things out, to derive things when no knowledge exists is a concept that seems rare today, and yet I’m sure it was rare as far as humanity existed. It is simply observation bias that made me believe the Renaissance period was any better than today. I didn’t read about all the billion people over the world who didn’t do anything while Da Vinci was doing something. Science and Technology ‘exist’ just as a lot of other things.
Most people know things – they don’t find out things, or learn things; they just know things. I came back from a road trip an hour ago on a route that everyone knew had no places to stay or eat, and yet I stayed in warm lodgings, clean beds, and ate some of the best American food in 20 years. We know toast is made by heating bread. We know we’re supposed to go ‘ahhh’ when we eat French or Italian food, and we know bread can’t be made any other way because – well wouldn’t we know about it already? Red wine is better than White wine. Gas pumps have gas, because… they just do, don’t they? Two drinks are never dangerous for driving because I always have control.
Unfortunately, a lot of science education programs also follow this pattern. There exists the earth. It is round. We live on it. It revolves around the sun. I literally don’t know a single person (including myself) around me who can devise a simple experiment right now on the spot to test whether or not the earth is round. I went through five years of college being told Knowledge (no, not a grammatical error there, I was literally told Knowledge – as in a proper noun).
The one thing that really defines the Renaissance was the spirit of individuality and discovery. Leonardo didn’t make ‘great’ paintings, as if God had said, “Let there be a definition of great paintings that humans can aim for. There was hence a definition for what maketh paintings great.” Leonardo made paintings – they were appreciated. Others couldn’t make much better than his, and his paintings obtained value. The renaissance evolved and nurtured the process of independent thought and opinionated thinking (two things I value most.)
I wrote once before about how a process (also called a model) is what defines everything about science, and perhaps what defines science itself versus… well, lack-of-science. I can’t be more precise than that because process is all-encompassing. String theories don’t define one outcome, but define a process by which outcomes for all situations can be predicted. ‘Solutions of equations of the n’th degree’ in mathematics are really the processes used to solve any system of any number of equations with any number of variables of the n’th degree. As a child I had the opportunity to read some interesting books by 20th century scientists, and one difference I noted from modern populist writing is their emphasis on their line of reasoning, their attempts at scientific enquiry, the setbacks, the necessity for designing creative experiments to test hypothesis.
For the last three years, I’d been trying to figure out just what makes me such a mad fan of the Mythbusters, and the answer is that they are more old-school scientists than many I have met in my life in a university. Of course one does chance upon those rare inquisitive individuals who want to know, but they are few and far apart. I must say that the Mythbusters remind me of some of the influential people from my past who made me who I am today – people who genuinely wanted to find out. I will put this out there – Adam and Jamie are two of the very best science teachers that exist on earth today, and the reason is precisely because they are not scientists (while that’s clearly not true, we’ll go by their claim for now.)
They love to discover. They love to figure out. Sure, you’d say, why figure out what’s already known? If you really just said that, then you don’t know squat! 
To design an experiment to test a hypothesis is a complex task, heck there’s a whole specialization one can study in design of experimentation. Designing an experiment for a theory that cannot be easily tested rarely happens through dreams, no matter how much we want to believe that that’s how we’ll get rich some day. It comes through practice. Let’s be honest, half the things Adam and Jamie test are not known – sure we can make an educated guess at them, but we don’t know them do we? Chickens are not spheres with point mass.
The Mythbusters teach true, pure science, while selflessly claiming they’re not scientists. They derive from first-principles. Instead of assuming chickens are spheres of point-mass, they start with chickens as chickens, and spherical-masses as spherical-masses. If the two being shot out of a cannon demonstrate the same result, Adam goes, “Hmm… Jamie, what if we replaced our chickens with small spherical balls?” (such a thing has not really happened on the show, I made that up.) This casual remark teaches tons more science than all of high-school physics put together. It demonstrates how generalizations come to be in the first place. What the phrase, ‘without loss of generality’ means. What substitutions are allowed. How experiments must be broken down. How do you discover theory in the first place?
Deriving from basics is one of the key overlooked abilities of this decade. Yes, we know the earth is round. We know we can go in space and figure it out. We also know that some ancients figured it out long ago. Most readers of this blog, I’m sure, are at least self-styled techies who are ‘in the know’ about all things technology. I doubt there’s anyone who can come up with an experiment to test the veracity of that hypothesis right now without leaving this page. That’s the kind of stuff the Mythbusters do daily. Some of the tests they are asked to conduct are impossible to imagine being tested. It is like a classic Sherlock Holmes mystery – when you know the answer, it’s obvious, it couldn’t have been anyone else! I’ve been racking my own brains for the last hour trying to figure out how, given that I don’t even know what “The earth” is, I would attempt to figure out its shape. I’ve had formal education in high-school physics.
They also follow a pre-declared results-based experimentation process. A lot of experiments in my high-school physics were dead-on in conclusions, but they never defined what a set of outcomes would have implied before the results were described. The Mythbusters approach is truly scientific. They would first ask: Why do you decide that you want to put an Apple in liquid nitrogen? Then they would define what each outcome would imply: Suppose it were to come out soft, what would that tell us? Suppose it were to come out hard, what would that tell us?
Objectivity is very hard to learn – and is a constant struggle. We all hope our very first outcome is favourable, and it rarely is. Data is manipulated, conclusions are creatively worded, because the results don’t quite imply what we expect them do. The Mythbusters are not afraid to fail, but heck, they love to fail! Almost every other episode they are proven wrong. They love it! It doesn’t get any purer science than that!
If today’s kids are going to break new barriers, then they must have the ability to derive from first-principles – from the very basic axioms. This however, must be done without compromising clear and hard science. Plenty of out-of-the-box thinkers who promote unlearning what universities teach, get too carried away in philosophy, spirituality or just plain stupidity. Deriving from first-principles never causes you to unlearn what you have learnt, but rather causes you to conform what you have learnt. If you were to put an apple in liquid nitrogen, no matter how out-of-the-box you are, it must have the same results as anyone else doing it. If not, you’ve hit upon something and must find out why.
I’m glad the President Obama recognized such brilliant men who love to discover and figure out. It is heartening to see them teaching principles of science (and I know secretly that they too know they are following the scientific method) without making it ‘science’. Under the casual tone of ‘obvious necessary steps’, they are secretly teaching some very fundamental methods of scientific enquiry that took me years to learn.
EDIT: Some people just asked me, why this is important. We come across people treating simple problems as if they were obstacles created by God, or treating solutions as if they just came into existence of their own accord, without appreciating that there was some human being who developed that solution. If one cannot appreciate that, then one can never look at current problems as solvable, since they inevitably ‘exist’. Brings to me frightful visions of the Eloi.
