Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Science & Observation

This is how science works:
1) do experiment  & observe the results
2) develop a hypothesis which explains the results
3) done...until someone observes something that cannot be explained

What if we cannot do the experiment? Like switching from democracy to something else? Or making drugs legal? etc. What if the duration of impact of the experiment spans lifetime of an individual and makes it impossible to observe. Any experience whose patterns "size" is bigger than the amount of time we spend in that experience would remain a mystery for us. While stuck in a traffic jam we can wonder what is causing it, but we cannot really know what happened because we will only be able to see anything when the jam is over.  Does a software rewrite makes sense for a startup? If the startup runs out of funds before completing the rewrite or never does a rewrite because of fear that it will run out of funds, the experiment remains incomplete.

The only way to understand such patterns is via communication.  I am using the word communication in the extreme sense. Not restricted to just people talking, but newspaper, history, journals, blogs, tweets, etc. Don't know how theory of relativity looks when we add the extra element of communication between observers into it.

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