Science and Scientific Objectivity

Our ideas about science and what it can prove or disprove have changed a lot in the last fifty years.  It is no longer that solid diamond of truth, uncovered by a nearly endless series of questions, experiments, hypotheses, comparisons and variations.  The much-vaunted scientific objectivity (cf. Max Weber) may not even exist.   The realities of nature, our mental constructs, are a great deal stranger than we have thought, or perhaps can even imagine.

“Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and Bohr's Principle of Complementarity suggested a subtler model of truth than classical physics and Cartesian philosophy put forward. The scientific method had been premised on the clear separation of the true and the false, the observer and the observed. In these concepts, they began to blur. They suggested a model of the world in which what is seen to contingent upon where you look from, the objectivity of the spectator is undermined, observation becomes a form of involvement, and no position is detached.”

“[Heisenberg] went on to say that science is not a description of nature, but of the interaction between scientists and nature, “nature as exposed by our method of questioning.” In other words, science was a conversation whose answers depended on the questions, and the narrative, the account of the conversation, had to include the questioner. The pigeonholes which had been so central to ideals of scientific method could not encompass such a narrative.”      

Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams, pp. 140-141