Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.
In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.
I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.
He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.
But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.
Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.
To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.
H2O is not water
Is water a collection of H2O particles but not a H2O particle by itself?
Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.
In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.
I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.
He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.
But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.
Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.
To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.