Her in the US March Madness is upon us. Not that its onset is anything new. But we are about to determine who is the best college basketball team in the ‘world’. How teams are selected to even be qualified to be considered among the 64 who will compete is complicated. The venue and the seed of who plays who, when and where can make a difference. Who feels good on a given day and what coach makes a strategic error – when and how bad – all make a difference. And yet, by April there will be a general consensus of who is best. Oficionados of the sport will have one more affirmed fact at their disposal. The name goes with the school but one individual who arbitrarily chose to matriculate there may be more responsible for the accolade than the institution. But he will be duly compensated for his heroic acts when he enters the next phase of madness in the NBA.
And so it goes.
What we know – or consider ourselves as knowing – has passed through a number of somewhat arbitrary filters as warranty. Who was the best racehorse foaled in 1971? The answers may be trivial, but factual, as what we allow ourselves to state confidently that we ‘know’. All such knowledge is the answer to some question or other, the correct answer to which exists and we feel certain with regard to what that answer is. But our certainty is based on knowing the tests that were passed in getting to that answer. Not that the tests were legitimate or meaningful. We ‘know’ the procedures.
Our knowledge is not limited to the answers to trivial questions with clear answers based on a set of well-defined procedures. We think we know the answers to extremely complicated scientific questions like, “When did the universe begin?” What?!!! So we have to look at who beat who by how much to justify that answer. And if you can’t do it, you ain’t an oficionado in this sport; you’re just a redneck kid saying, “My dad can whoop your dad!” or “Onion defeated Secretariat so whataya think of them apples?”
What we know is complicated by probabilities of who would beat who, how many times out of ten or thirty-nine, and by how much. And then do we determine the answer by how many times or by how much? Or is there a formula for combining the two… or three… or quadrillion.
That’s where science is at and we need to acknowledge it. And at the same time, there’s a baby in that bathwater. It seems to me that science has decided to worry about the bathwater more than the occupant. There are real transactions happening that are the basis of investigations that need to be understood probabilistically, but only after they are understood individually, one transaction at a time. There’s a fine line.
To understand the phenomenon of forward scattering in a plasma – or anything else for that matter – one must straddle that line.
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