INSIGHTS
I know that many scientists have little re- gard or appreciation for the relevance of the philosophy and history of science. If you are among them, Hasok Chang’s Is Water H2O? will change your mind. It may not change the way you do your
experiments or write your grants. But it will
change the way you review grants and papers, it will change the way you mentor your
students, and it will certainly change the way
you teach science. And that means it will
change the way you think about science—as
well as much of the educational, financial,
political, and public relations mess it currently finds itself in.
Chang is a philosophical magician—
not a sleight-of-hand artist but a deft il-
lusionist who forces you to rethink your
commonsense knowledge of the world and
how you believe it works. He takes a simple
question, one that we all know the answer
to—or think we do—and then shows us that
our reflexive response to the question prob-
ably isn’t correct. And more than that, he
uses this simple little question to explore the
whole of the way we pursue scientific expla-
nations—and then just for kicks he suggests a
radical new approach for doing science.
So, is water H2O? Of course it is. How
do we know that? For most of us, it will be
textbooks or teachers. I daresay that few if
any of us have any direct experience of actually making water from hydrogen and
oxygen; even fewer, of separating hydrogen
and oxygen from water and counting up the
numbers of atoms. Nonetheless, the formula
may be the most accepted statement in all
of chemistry. Indeed, it sits at the base of
the so-called chemical revolution begun by
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his contemporaries in the late 18th century. It underlies ideas of atomic and molecular weight, of
composition, of chemical bonding—the very
foundational concepts of chemistry. It does
not, as I suspect many of us think, underlie
explanations of combustion, heat production,
or reactions. In fact, those ideas were more
the province of the banished phlogiston—
the imponderable source of combustion and
its slower counterpart, oxidation, or rust.
But phlogiston, the conceptual basis of the
work on gases by Joseph Priestley and Henry
Cavendish, was vanquished by Lavoisier and
his followers. All very ironic, since it was
Priestley who discovered and first produced
oxygen and hydrogen. Priestley called the remarkable gas dephlogisticated air; Lavoisier
gave it the name oxygen. One should actually say the misnomer since “oxygen” means
acid generator and was based on Lavoisier’s
incorrect proposition that all acids were
formed of oxygen. Nonetheless, it was oxygen that made Lavoisier famous, and he in
turn remains the source of several incorrect
ideas about it—one of them being that water
is H2O, in the sense that H2O is a complete
description of water.
Aside from the simple interest and fascina-
tion of how scientific facts come about, and
how so-called scientific revolutions become
historical events, Chang uses this example to
show us that we scientists have a very bad
habit of abandoning theories, systems, or
programs prematurely, playing science as if
it were a winner-take-all game.
Using phlogiston and other similar cases,
mostly from chemistry, Chang weaves a very
convincing, if radical, argument: By abandoning theories and choosing a single favorite, for often unfounded reasons or reasons
that may be as much sociological as scientific, we implicitly subscribe to a monistic
view of science—in which there is always
one, and only one, right answer. Not only is
this probably incorrect, it is terribly limiting. Even if ultimately there is one correct
answer, we are nowhere near ultimately in
any of our science. So why adopt monistic
views that are surely going to be at least
partly wrong? There is no good reason that
all of physics adopted Newton’s views, except
that they were very successful. And then,
ultimately, they were wrong in some ways—
time and space are not absolute even though
we continue to teach our children a physics in which they are. Had we not been in
such a rush to become devoted Newtonians,
we might not have had to wait another 250
years to find out that time and space are relative and light speed is absolute.
Chang argues for the position that science
should be a pluralistic pursuit of explanation, that it can only benefit by being pluralistic, and that monism warps the effort
in every way—from funding, to publishing,
to teaching, to …, well, understanding. His
H2O, murkier
than you
thought
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
By Stuart Firestein
The reviewer is at the Department of Biological Sciences,
Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA. E-mail: sjf24@
columbia.edu
Is Water H2O?
Evidence, Realism and Pluralism
Hasok Chang
Springer, 2012. 338 pp.
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