Analog March 1986 [antikvár]

iditaidMBSMG LIKSStanley SdimidtSome years ago a friend of mine came up with a conjecture that 1 thinii you. too, may find worth some thought though I suspect the conclusions you eventually reach may differ a bit from your first expectations. It concerns the most basic origins of scienceand the possibility that there may be whole fields of science whose existence we may not even suspect because of fundamental limitations in our makeup.All the thinking we do seems to happen in a couple of pounds of protoplasm locked firmly inside our skulls and linked to the outside world by our senses. All we "directly" know about what's Out There comes through these conduits, of which there is a finite and rather small number (commonly, though perhaps misleadingly, quoted as five).We think we know a lot more, but all that we've deducedwhich means almost the entire body of what we call scientific knowledgeis ultimately the result of the processing of data obtained through sensory'inputs.Our knowledge of the physical sciences, for example, grew largely out of early man's preoccupation with astronomy. He had to know when to plant, when to harvest, when to move onand he noticed quite early that the motions of the lights in the sky called stars provided a way to keep track of these things. Somewhere along the line he noticed that the Moon and a few of the smaller lights did not move as the others did; thinking about that eventually led to Newton's theory of universal gravitation.And so on.4Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact