Needless to say, between most alternatives there is a spectrum. This one could be characterized as ignorance vs enlightenment or as humility vs snobbery. From which ever end we look at this spectrum, it is usually with naive simplicity.
Crank science like other conspiratorial endeavors tend to base conclusions on specific anecdotes whereas mainstream thought leans toward statistical averages of such anecdotes. Established scientific disciplines have tended to follow trajectories from the specific to the general. The behavior of a single molecule becomes lost in the ‘moles’ of similar molecules. A remnant of the individual molecule ‘type’ is included in the definition of the moles with which chemists work. But that definition involves Avogadro’s number of the atomic weight of the individual molecule type. Avogadro’s number is 602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000; I don’t know how one says that in English other than to indicate that it’s a quarter of the way to a google if one is speaking in logs. It’s big. So science got all the way down to the atom and back up this far.
If you enjoy a hamburger for lunch and contemplate the delicious flavor, it is not the taste of little Mykola Kovalenko’s pet big-eyed bovine 4-H project, Ferdinand that Myko loved deeply, who won a blue ribbon at the Winnemucca county fair, and was subsequently sold at auction for a nice price to contribute to Myko’s education. No. Your hamburger includes sinew from at least ten unloved steers, but otherwise much like Ferdinand, of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered annually by the meat processing industry for our nutritional benefit. Your hamburger may be specifically Hereford or Angus, but it isn’t Ferdinand and there’s not a lot in there that’s ever been loved before. You can be sure of that if that makes you feel better about your lunch.
And so it goes in our society… and in science.
Science has contributed much to benefit us all, but some of us keep going back to Ferdinand in our thoughts. For Myko, he wasn’t just meat – at least not until he was sufficiently indoctrinated to accept that as an inevitable fact.
So that’s where we are. We sort of get it and realize that no one is going to come along and actually make America great again, and certainly not science by going backwards. That would be the ultimate in fake news.
Boltzmann’s inspection of individual molecular interactions revealed that there was no irreversibility at that level. However the interaction took place, it could just as well have been done in reverse. That spurred thermodynamic research onward tothe statistical miracle of ’emergence’ of entropy from large numbers. It’s as if a new protein is introduced into your modern day hamburger by the vast number of individuals involved. No. Nothing still comes from nothing no matter how many times you wave your arms. If Ferdinand and his ill-fated ilk didn’t have it, it isn’t there!
So sometimes we have to step back naively to see what we missed. Boltzmann didn’t realize that molecular interactions were mediated by photons and that photon exchanges enforce constraints that are irreversible. That can be measurable statistically, but it occurs, and can only be properly understood by inspecting individual viable interactions.
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