The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens
Science.
When we consider the realm of science, inductive reasoning often comes to mind—experiments, observations, and empirical data that coalesce into general conclusions.
Human beings have an inherent proclivity to extrapolate from past experiences.
If the sun set today, it is expected to do so again tomorrow. If winter graced us last year, it is anticipated to return this year.
But why is it rational to assume that previous occurrences will recur?
The crux of this rationale lies in the repetitive pattern observable in nature. In the absence of contrary information, our most reliable method for predicting future events is to generalize based on our empirical observations. The practice of induction is thus anchored in the supposition of a universal propensity for regularity or uniformity in the natural order.
But again, why do we hold the conviction that repetition is intrinsic to nature? Well, because we have seen it, many times. We uphold our belief in uniformity by asserting that nature has consistently exhibited such regularity in the past, leading us to expect its continuance in the future.
Now this is funny.
This line of reasoning is circular— employing induction to justify induction constitutes a logical fallacy, rendering the argument irrational.
Imagine yourself as a turkey in a barn. Each day, you are nourished by a seemingly benevolent human. Through the lens of inductive reasoning, you should trust this individual—after all, he has been feeding you since the day you hatched. He provided for you today, just as he did yesterday, the day before, last week, and every day without fail. Until Thanksgiving Day, the narrative takes an unexpected turn. Instead of feeding you, this human roasts, stuffs, slices, and serves your corpse on a plate, slathered with a homemade cranberry sauce. Inductive reasoning, eh?
Inductive reasoning, it seems, is not the sole architect of modern science's success. What, then, has propelled modern science to such heights? What are the core principles that underlie it? And why did the emergence of modern science take so long?
Civilization has spanned millennia, yet modern science—distinct from the ancient and medieval sciences or what was once called natural philosophy—has existed for only a few centuries. Why did it take so long? Why weren’t the ancient Babylonians launching zero-gravity observatories into orbit? Why weren’t the ancient Greeks developing flu vaccines and performing heart transplants? The ancients were certainly not devoid of a thirst to unravel the mysteries of the world.
Circa 580 BCE, Thales, gazing from Miletus over the Aegean where sea and sky merge, proposed that everything is made of water. His pupil Anaximenes contested, argued that air is the fundamental substance, while Heraclitus, in Ephesus, posited fire. Back in Miletus, Anaximander, another of Thales’s students, suggested all things come from an invisible, limitless substance he called apeiron, or "the boundless." Despite their ingenuity and that of their successors—from Chinese scholars to medieval European monks—no single idea prevailed. While they enriched humanity’s pool of brilliant hypotheses, their contributions to actual knowledge were minimal. The reason is clear: premodern thinkers sometimes arrived at accurate concepts but lacked the means to distinguish them from competing theories.
So again, how does modern science work, and why is it so effective? Why did modern science arrive so late?
The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens is a profound analysis on the nature of scientific knowledge and the mechanisms that drive modern scientific progress. Strevens argues that the essence of modern science lies in its distinctive, counterintuitive, and sometimes “irrational” methodological framework—an approach defined by tedious experiments, rigorous empirical scrutiny, and systematic testing and falsifying hypothesis that one passionately believes in.
Ancient science, according to Strevens, relied more heavily on speculative reasoning and philosophical discourse, often lacking the stringent empirical and experimental rigor as well as the motivation to refute one’s own belief, the elements that characterize modern science.
Strevens posits that the evolution from ordinary individuals to modern scientists involves a process both morally and intellectually harsh. Much scientific research is conducted within a framework of “intellectual confinement”—an environment marked by laborious and often monotonous tasks that demand careful attention to minute details, such as fractional measurements and subtle degrees. For instance, Strevens highlights a biologist couple who, since 1973, have spent every summer on the Galápagos Islands measuring finches. It was only after four decades of tedious work that they were able to conclude that they had identified a new species of finch.
This kind of obsessiveness has enhanced modern science's productivity, yet Strevens contends that it reflects something fundamentally irrational and even “inhuman.” He notes that the intense focus on narrow, often monotonous tasks with uncertain results is inherently unappealing to most people. It is largely for this reason that rich and learned cultures around the world engaged in various forms of erudition and scholarly pursuits but did not develop this “knowledge machine” until relatively recently. Similarly, brilliant minds like Aristotle, who developed his own theories on physics, never proposed anything resembling the scientific method.
Another reason that could possibly explain the late arrival of modern science is that only a profound upheaval could disrupt the age-old perception of the world as a unified whole. The Thirty Years' War in Europe—initiated over religious disputes and culminating, after the deaths of millions, in the formation of nation-states—rendered compartmentalization increasingly attractive. Strevens suggested that it is after the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Europe changed: the resultant separation of civic and religious realms resulted in a zeitgeist where fruitful compartmentalisation was possible. Under this new order, religious identity was relegated to the private sphere, while political identity was relegated to the public arena. Although this division was not wholly realized in the 17th century, Strevens posits that it introduced the novel and previously unimaginable possibility of isolating science. This transformative era also overlapped with the career of Isaac Newton, acclaimed for his revolutionary advances in mathematics and physics who appeared at a fortuitous juncture.
Voila! Modern science took shape and gained its formidable strength through what Strevens terms “the iron rule of explanation.” This principle mandates that scientific disputes be resolved through empirical testing, enforcing a standardized language among scientists that overrides their personal beliefs, cultural biases, or narrow ambitions. While scientists are free to entertain a range of ideas, and their individual reasoning may be innovative and even unorthodox, they must adhere to this common standard to ensure effective communication in scientific discourse. The Royal Society of England, established in 1660, encapsulates this ethos with its motto: “Nullius in verba,” meaning “Take nobody’s word for it.”
Only a few years before Isaac Newton’s crisis of conscience, this iron rule was scarcely conceivable. It is true that Francis Bacon had earlier extolled inductive reasoning and close observation, but these methods could not yet be widely employed. Strevens cites Newton’s near-contemporary Descartes, whose philosophy relied on divine intervention. Before Newton, such a deus ex machina was if not necessary then commonplace; after Newton, citing unobservable causes was intellectually shoddy.
If God lurked behind data or if snowflakes were beautiful, such matters were not the scientist’s business. “I do not feign hypotheses,” Isac Newton wrote imperiously in the second edition of his Principia in 1713. Strevens calls this iron rule unreasonable. Science is stimulated because of subjective impulses, he argues. And yet they can play no role in scientific argument. Science self-immunises from the corruption that makes it worth doing.
This book contains some captivating insights, including a refined section on quantum mechanics that illustrates why it’s such an effective theory, deployed in computer chips and medical imaging, even though leading physicists, including Feynman, concede that a full understanding remains elusive. Strevens also offers a…critical view of contemporary scientists, depicting them as uninspired drones who are stripped of genuine curiosity by a program of moralizing and miseducation. According to Strevens, the truly exceptional scientists have managed to escape the deadening effects of this indoctrination, while the majority represent merely the standard product of this system—an empiricist all the way down.
Okay, here’s the disagreement section as usual…The previous book I was reading was the Gallileo’s error, although it wasn’t the main content of the book, the author argued that when we think about modern scientific success, we over glorified the “get out the armchair and into the lab” concept. Strevens attributed almost all of modern science’s success on the “iron rule”, the peculiar tedious and narrow-focused experiments, which I agree to an extent. However, placing superiority on "getting out of the armchair and into the lab” can lead to an oversimplistic conception of what modern science is. In fact, certain crucial scientific developments have involved radically reimagining nature, dreaming up possibilities— perhaps from the comfort of an armchair-that nobody had previously entertained.
There are some examples in that illustrated how great scientists have reimagined nature: Uniting Heaven and Earth Popular myth tells us that Newton was the first person to realize that apples fall to the ground. Of course, he wasn't. But he was the first person to entertain the idea that what makes apples fall to the ground is the same thing that keeps the moon in orbit around the earth. It had not previously occurred to anyone that a single force might be responsible for both of these phe-nomena. What now seems to us so natural was at the time an inspired leap of the imagination. See, armchair, not lab.
Uniting Space and Time Before the twentieth century, scientists had taken it for granted that space and time are different things. Indeed, time and space do seem to have very different characteristics: time flows from past to future, while space seems to be "all there" at once. It was thus a radical reimagining of nature when Hermann Minkowski, in his mathematical interpretation of Einstein's special theory of relativity, dispensed with "space" and "time" as distinct entities. and replaced them with a single entity: spacetime.
Minkowski uniting Gravity and Inertia just as nobody before Newton had dreamed of identifying the force which pulls apples to the ground with the force which Keeps the moon in orbit, so nobody before Einstein had dreamed of identifying gravitational force with inertia force. And that was not all: in Einstein's baling reimagining of nature, gravitational force is the result of curvature in the fabric of spacetime. We can only be in awe of the imagination that was able to dream up such a picture of the world. Of course, all of these novel reimaginings of nature were subsequently tested with observation and experiment in order to work out whether we have any reason to think that they are true.
Point is, there is danger is overemphasizing the glory of the “lab” portion of science and minimize the “armchair” portion.
But again, I do understand that you can’t write a book and say “imagination created modern science”, that would also be hugely inaccurate. It’s just that within the book, the way Strevens describe science’s success as though it has been achieved because we stripped away all other humanism and only focused on the iron rule. I believe the reality is that they go side-by-side.
Overall, great book, I highly recommend it.
