Part of the success of science comes from the creation and use of scientific instruments. Yet, before you can make good use of any new scientific instrument, you have to first solve what I’m going to call the “scaffolding problem.”
A scientific instrument is, broadly speaking, any device or tool that you can use to study the world. At the most abstract level, the way a scientific instrument works is that it interacts with the world in some way resulting in a change in its state. You then study the change in the instrument’s state as a way of learning about the world.
For example, imagine you want to use a thermometer to learn the temperature of a cup of water. Instead of studying the water directly, what the thermometer lets you do is study the thermometer itself to learn the temperature instead of studying the water directly. For a device as well-calibrated as a modern thermometer, this works extremely well.
Now imagine you’ve invented some new scientific instrument and you want to figure out whether it works. How would you go about doing that? This is a surprisingly difficult problem.
Here’s an abstract way of stating it:
We want to learn about some phenomenon, X.
X is not directly observable, so we infer it from some other phenomenon, Y.
If we want to know if Y tells us about X, we cannot use Y itself, we must use some other phenomenon, Z.
If Z is supposed to tell us about X, then either:
4a) There’s no need to infer X from Y, we should just infer it from Z OR
4b) We have to explain why we can infer X from Z, which repeats this problem
To understand the problem, take the case of the thermometer. If we have the world’s first thermometer what we want to know is whether the thermometer tells us about the temperature. But, to do that we need to know the temperature. But if we knew the temperature there wouldn’t be a need to invent a thermometer in the first place.
Given that we have scientific instruments like thermometers, you can guess that there is a solution to this problem. But, the solution is tricky and takes careful triangulation between multiple methods of studying the phenomenon, none of which you totally trust.
I plan to write more on this and how the scaffolding process works in the future
The scaffolding problem in early stage science
Part of the success of science comes from the creation and use of scientific instruments. Yet, before you can make good use of any new scientific instrument, you have to first solve what I’m going to call the “scaffolding problem.”
A scientific instrument is, broadly speaking, any device or tool that you can use to study the world. At the most abstract level, the way a scientific instrument works is that it interacts with the world in some way resulting in a change in its state. You then study the change in the instrument’s state as a way of learning about the world.
For example, imagine you want to use a thermometer to learn the temperature of a cup of water. Instead of studying the water directly, what the thermometer lets you do is study the thermometer itself to learn the temperature instead of studying the water directly. For a device as well-calibrated as a modern thermometer, this works extremely well.
Now imagine you’ve invented some new scientific instrument and you want to figure out whether it works. How would you go about doing that? This is a surprisingly difficult problem.
Here’s an abstract way of stating it:
We want to learn about some phenomenon, X.
X is not directly observable, so we infer it from some other phenomenon, Y.
If we want to know if Y tells us about X, we cannot use Y itself, we must use some other phenomenon, Z.
If Z is supposed to tell us about X, then either: 4a) There’s no need to infer X from Y, we should just infer it from Z OR 4b) We have to explain why we can infer X from Z, which repeats this problem
To understand the problem, take the case of the thermometer. If we have the world’s first thermometer what we want to know is whether the thermometer tells us about the temperature. But, to do that we need to know the temperature. But if we knew the temperature there wouldn’t be a need to invent a thermometer in the first place.
Given that we have scientific instruments like thermometers, you can guess that there is a solution to this problem. But, the solution is tricky and takes careful triangulation between multiple methods of studying the phenomenon, none of which you totally trust.
I plan to write more on this and how the scaffolding process works in the future
This was quite an interesting point I hadn’t considered before. Looking forward to reading more.