Tag Archives: Science

What Should We Do?

Posted on by
Reply

Submitted for publication

I start with the note that the following are my thoughts and my conclusions.  I will also note that I made no use of any AI technology in the creation of this manuscript.

I offered some thoughts on the use of AI technology in “The Questions We Ask AI – https://godandnature.asa3.org/mitchell-questions-for-ai.html.   

I am writing this from the perspective of a chemist and chemical educator.  Those who are in other sciences may have episodes in their lives which echo what I present in this manuscript.

I was also a lay speaker/minister in the United Methodist Church and while that was not part of my teaching, it was part of my thinking.

Why do we “do” science? 

Is it because we can create new things?

Is it because we see a problem and we want to know the answer. 

Or are there other reasons for doing science?

No matter why we “do” science, we must also understand that while science may provide us with an answer, it cannot always answer all the questions we may pose.  We must also understand that the answers we obtain are not always going to be the answers we sought.

And we must also consider that results of our work may lead to consequences that we may not have anticipated when we began our research.

Early in my own studies, I was given the idea that science was neutral.  You “did” science to answer a question or solve a problem.  But science, nor any other subject, can never be neutral, for we use the information we have gained for our own purposes, whatever it may be and whether for good or evil.

What would you do if you discovered something that could make you rich beyond your wildest dreams?  What if it didn’t make you as rich as you might have wanted but it made society better?

In the fourth Star Trek movie, “Voyage Home”, Scotty gives Dr. Nichols the necessary information for making “transparent aluminum” in exchange for some plexiglass panels so the Enterprise crew can make a holding tank for the whales they will transport back to their time to repopulate the species and save the Earth.

Dr. McCoy had promised Dr. Nichols would become rich beyond his wildest dreams if he accepted the information.  He also asked Scotty if, in doing this, they were not changing history’s timeline.  Scott asked, “How do we know that he didn’t develop the process”, thus preserving the timeline.

We are beginning to see such questions arise from the development of AI (artificial intelligence).  While the possibilities for good seem endless, there are too many examples to suggest this approach still has a lot of work before we can rely on it – link to my AI paper. 

When I was still teaching in the classroom, I would spend the first couple of days discussing “The Processes of Science” (The Processes of Science | Thoughts From The Heart On The Left (wordpress.com)).  I did this because most of my students did not understand how science worked and knowing how science worked was essential for success in my courses and in their later coursework and after they got out of school.

One year, during this discussion, one student commented that science had eliminated God from the equation (not his exact words but close to the point).  As many before him, this student pointed out that humankind had long created gods (lower case) to explain natural phenomena and as science developed and began to offer physical explanations for natural phenomena, the need for a god disappeared.  There was only a need for God to explain the material that science could not explain.  The student made the argument that science would ultimately find an explanation for everything and thus God would be eliminated.

I responded by saying that science could not explain the presence of good and evil in the world.  Were good and evil measurable quantities?  Or were they somehow encoded in our DNA?

If good and evil were part of a person’s DNA, what was society going to do?  That is a question that has haunted society since the idea of good and evil were first defined.  And history has shown that bad things happen when society has tried to make evil to the property of being a human being.  As I pointed out to the student, that was a path that I was not willing to go down.

If good and evil are not measurable quantities or part of our DNA, what then are they?  More to the point, what are we to do?

This is not about the concept of free will.  I believe that the choices we make are of our own volition, and based on what we have been taught, knowingly or otherwise.  From my own life experience, I know that, knowingly or otherwise, good and evil can be taught (see https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/its-not-about-a-piece-of-cloth/).

What then should we do with the discoveries we make today or will make tomorrow? 

When Alfred Nobel saw the consequences of his inventing dynamite, he created the Nobel Prizes. 

Do we limit what we teach to limit evil? 

Or do we focus on the good and hide the evil?  And who decides what is good and what is evil? 

Do we do something for the good that it provides now and wait to see what happens later?

Do we limit our work today because others may use the results for their own malevolent purposes tomorrow? 

Do we limit our work today knowing that it will make reaching tomorrow harder to reach?

Should we create courses that study the mistakes of our past (Agent Orange and Times Beach, MO; Love Canal, thalidomide) so we do not repeat those mistakes in the future?

Do we see the present and seek options for the future?  (see https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2023/03/23/alternative-energy-resources-reading-assignment/ for some thoughts about alternative energy resources).

And while the combination of good and evil may be the result of the “Law of Unintended Consequences”, we must still answer the question, “What should we do?”

We created a class of chemicals now known as “forever chemicals” that had a unique set of properties.  Now we know that those same properties are leading to disturbing environmental questions.  Should there have been more study concerning those environmental questions been completed before releasing the compounds for public use?

Whatever we do, we must first ask what we, individually or collectively, should do?

It should be noted that I have never watched an episode of “Breaking Bad.”  This is because episodes in my life echo much of the plot.

When I began studying chemistry, one major chemical manufacturer’s advertising slogan was “Better living through chemistry.”  Because of many factors, this slogan was changed.

Early in my chemistry career, someone approached me at a party and asked me if I could make them some LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide).  I replied that I could, but it would cost that person $250,000 with ½ up front and ½ upon delivery.  This person was shocked that I would put such a price tag on a reasonably easy synthesis.  To which I replied, if I made this compound, it would probably mean the end of my career, and I wanted to make sure that I was covered. 

What I didn’t tell him was that I really didn’t have the skills, the equipment, or a place to do the work.  This person went looking for someone else to make his life better through chemistry.

A few years later, I was in graduate school.  One morning, there was a note in every graduate student’s mailbox telling them that effective that morning, any materials or chemicals that they might need for their research required a signed note from their research advisor.  It turned out that one of the graduate students had been making amphetamines in his research laboratory.  Since it looked like a typical project, no one questioned what he was doing.

This graduate student was so proud of his work that he bragged about it at a campus watering hole.  The weekend before the memo, the DEA and other law enforcement agencies raided the laboratory, seized his materials and equipment, and arrested him.  His life got worse through chemistry.

In 1986, NOVA broadcast an episode entitled “The Case of the Frozen Addict” (https://archive.org/details/TheCaseoftheFrozenAddict).  It described the health concerns of several addicts who had become “frozen” after taking what they thought was heroin.  It turned out that it was another compound, synthesized by a local chemist. 

This chemist had taken advantage of a loophole in the drug laws by synthesizing a molecule with the properties of heroin but with a different structure.  Unfortunately, the material that was sold on the street was contaminated and the containments caused neurological problems, resulting in the patients being in “frozen” or catatonic state.

The patients were “cured” by treating them as if they were stricken with Parkinson’s disease and several research areas developed from this discovery.  The chemist was arrested on a tax charge (failure to declare income) rather than any drug-related charge (the drug he synthesized was legal under the laws of the time).  While he denied making the drug, it was evident that he was suffering from the same effects from the containment in the product he made.

While an examination of the by-products provided an insight into the onset of Parkinson’s disease and offered a possible pathway for a cure, it also illustrated the problems involved with the synthesis of drugs.

In 1938, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn published a paper that described nuclear fission and the subsequent release of energy.  At that time, most physicists felt that this would allow nations to develop a weapon of immense destructive power.  Would they have felt this way if the winds of war were not blowing and getting stronger every day? 

Many of those who worked on the development of the first atomic bombs did so because they saw it as a problem to be solved and were appalled at the degree of devastation it wrought and argued against the further development of such weapons.

Others wanted to develop the hydrogen bomb with its increased destructive power, arguing that knowing that the devastation that would come from its use would prevent its use.  We have come to know this as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. 

Others sought to use the promise of unlimited energy in a more controlled manner and develop nuclear power as an energy source, saying that it was cheap and clean.

We have learned that even the peaceful use of nuclear power produces waste that would haunt society for untold generations.

Was the development of atomic weapons and atomic power truly worth the outcome? 

In 1909, Fritz Haber developed a method for converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia under high pressure and high temperature with a suitable catalyst.  Carl Bosch took the method Haber had developed and scaled it up to produce ammonia on an industrial basis.  Haber would be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918; Bosch would be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1931.

The Haber-Bosch process (named after its inventors) requires high temperatures and high pressures. The cost of production is directly related to the price of fuel; as the cost of fuel rises, so does the cost of fertilizer.

And as we have become accustomed to using ammonia-based fertilizers, we have stripped our farmlands of natural sources of fertilizer. One reason for rotating crops is to allow land to recover from repeated usage.

That is why farmers plan soybeans.  Soybeans are one of the major agricultural crops of this country, not so much for what can be done with them (which is a lot) but for what they do when it is in the field. The soybean plant is one of the few plants that contain a bacterium that take nitrogen from the air and “turns” it into fertilizer.  However, we do not have a complete understanding of how this is done.

Are there other alternatives?  Do these alternatives come with hidden costs?

In 1914, Haber worked on the development of chemical weapons such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas, believing that the development of such weapons could limit or reduce warfare.  And the legacy of the development of chemical weapons during World War I remains with us today.

Regarding war and peace, Haber once said,

“During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country.”  This was an example of the ethical dilemmas facing chemists at that time. (Novak, Igor (2011). Science: a many-splendored thing. Singapore: World Scientific. pp.247–316. ISBN 9814304743. Retrieved 16 September 2014 – from Wikipedia)

Do the needs of the country outweigh the needs of society?

Does loyalty to one’s country outweigh loyalty to one’s conscience?

I began this manuscript with the note that I was writing from the standpoint of chemistry and chemical education and my own faith.  These are areas that deal with the future.  The challenge I present to you today is to see how you will prepare your students for the future to maximize the good and minimize the evil.

The Questions We Ask AI – The Questions AI Answers

Posted on by
2

This is my contribution to the April 2024 Fishkill UMC newsletter; it appears in the Fall 2024 issue of God & Nature.

I am a chemist because of a question I was asked in 1966.  Some questions that I was asked in 1974 and could not answer caused me to evaluate my career path.  (It should be noted that I know the answers to those questions today).  I earned a Ph.D. in science education with an emphasis on chemical education because of some questions I was asking about how students learned chemistry.

I became a lay speaker/servant in the United Methodist Church because, in 1990, I asked myself what the best way was to fulfill the commitment I made in 1965 when I earned the God & Country award.

The path I have walked over these past years was determined, in part, because of the questions I was asked and how I answered them. 

It is perhaps an axiom of research that the answer to one question leads to the development of two new questions.

When chemists were still known as alchemists, they asked the question, “Is there a substance that dissolves everything?”

Can there be a substance that dissolves everything?  If there was, what would you put it in?  Obviously, if this substance dissolves everything, it would dissolve the container you put it in.  It would also dissolve everything which it contacted, creating havoc and destruction.  This leads to two questions.

First, how could we study such a “super solvent’?

Could we use AI systems?  We could provide the AI system with information concerning the nature of solvents, the nature of solutions, information about the nature of materials that make up containers, as well as a discussion of bonding and why containers normally do not react with the materials that are put in them.

AI systems have already been used to “solve” other chemistry questions.  One research group already used an AI system to reconstruct the periodic table from existing data.  However, it was not clear if the results included the noble gases (Stanford AI recreates chemistry’s periodic table of elements | Chemistry – https://chemistry.stanford.edu/news/stanford-ai-recreates-chemistrys-periodic-table-elements).

AI-systems can achieve results that humans may not achieve.  We can set up an AI-system to analyze a series of digital images (such as X-rays, MRI, and CAT scans) to detect the presence of cancer cells at a resolution beyond the capabilities of the human eye.  But to do this, someone must supply the images that have cancer cells so that the system can “learn” what to look for.  If the system does not have this information, it cannot determine what is a cancer cell and what is not.

At the present time, AI systems are not intelligent.  They do not create new information, only copy current information.  It still takes a human to create new information.

While some may use AI systems to write reports, all the system is doing is gathering all the information that can be found on the web that is related to the topic and putting it together in a readable format.  But this system has not created any new information, and, in my opinion, the ability to create new information is one hallmark of intelligence.

Joshua Conrad Jackson, a professor and lead researcher at Chicago Booth, conducted a study about the ability of an AI-system to produce a sermon.  He concluded,

“Our research arrives at a point where automation is pervading every job industry, and it suggests that some professions may not be automated so easily.  Robots may struggle in professions like priests or monks, that require high levels of creativity.” 

see Researchers tried out AI preachers — and it didn’t go so well (zmescience.com)– https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/researchers-tried-out-ai-preachers-and-it-didnt-go-so-well/

For all the benefits we might gain, the study of a “super solvent” generates two new questions:

“Why would you want to synthesize such a substance?”

“What value would there be in even designing a substance that might destroy the world?”

AI systems can gather large amounts of data, but it is becoming clear that this process cannot differentiate between good and bad data.  Reports created from this approach contain serious errors, so the veracity of any reports generated may have to be questioned.  A chemistry teacher reported on a Facebook group that their students were using AI-systems to gather information about various chemistry topics, but they were not checking the validity of the information.

AI systems are also being shown to be discriminatory.  Not everyone gains from the use of such systems.  The use of AI systems may only widen the digital divide we see developing today.  In addition, the approach used by AI systems seems to ignore standard privacy protections (granted that even we humans often have this same problem). 

What is to stop AI-systems from being used to develop potentially hazardous materials?

In the end, do the benefits gained from the use of AI systems outweigh the negative values?  Can AI systems be taught to differentiate between good and bad data?  Can AI systems understand the nature of privacy protection and other laws related to the use of personal information?

Notes on AI

I am not opposed to the development of new technologies, such as AI systems, if it will make my work easier to accomplish.  While I tend to prepare the initial drafts of my manuscripts with pen and paper, I do use current technology (personal computer, the Internet, online correspondence, etc.) to share the results of my work.  But the systems that I use only aid in what I do, not do it for me.

In the Star Trek movie “Resurrection”, Sojef, one of the Ba’ku leaders, says to Jean Luc Picard why his group rejected technology.

“We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.”

Perhaps the ultimate question that must be asked is “what will the future be?”  Will the future be human driven or technologically driven?  Will it be progressive and positive but will our reliance and possibly subservience lead to the destruction of mankind?

As we move to an even more technologically oriented society, we must not be blinded by the movement.  There must be an active effort to keep humans in the equation and in control, not just part of the solution.

Notes

AI and humanity – Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology (luthscitech.org)

What Is Artificial Intelligence? How Does It Work? – Sinai and Synapses

A Path of Science and Faith

Posted on by
1

This is my contribution to the 2024 Religion and Science weekend, sponsored by the Clergy Letter Project, and Boy Scout Sunday. It will also appear in the upcoming February issue of the Fishkill United Methodist Church newsletter.

——————————————————————————————–

I had no idea when I began my journey with Christ back in 1965 where it would lead or what I would do.  It wasn’t until I drove across the plains of north Missouri back in the 1990s that I was reminded that I had entered a covenant with God and that I needed to fulfill my part of the covenant.  I then began exploring ways to become a lay speaker/servant and ultimately a lay minister (A Reminder | Thoughts From The Heart On The Left (wordpress.com) – https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/a-reminder/).

Similarly, when I choose to become a chemistry major in 1966, I had no idea what I would do with the degree.  To be honest, on the day I graduated from Truman State University, I thought that I would be going to graduate school at the University of Memphis.  But I received a phone call from a local school district shortly after graduation and, a few hours later, sign a provisional contract to teach chemistry and physical science.  This diversion from graduate school to teaching would provide the impetus for my later graduate studies and the completion of my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa.

In one of my classes at Iowa, we discussed the issues of creationism and intelligent design and the impact these issues would have on science education.  This was not the first time I encountered these issues.   

In 1980, the Missouri state legislature was preparing to pass a bill that would have told biology teachers how to teach biology, by including creationism in the discussion of evolution.  I suppose I could have ignored this because I only taught chemistry, but one must be careful when individuals who do not have any knowledge of the processes of science (“The Processes of Science”) try to tell science teachers what to teach and how to teach it.  I was prepared to resign if the law passed and was surprised to find that my department chairman, a devout Southern Baptist layman and biologist, was also going to resign (No one told me: Thoughts on the relationship of science and faith | Thoughts From The Heart On The Left (wordpress.com) – https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2021/07/23/no-one-told-me/). 

I don’t believe that I have ever had a conflict with my faith and my science background.  I accepted the idea that God created the earth and the heavens, but I never accepted the idea that it was done in six days.  And the more I studied things, the more I began to see the hand of God present in creation.

And as my studies and work in the areas of faith and science began to converge (“The Confluence Between Religion and Science” | Thoughts From The Heart On The Left (wordpress.com) – https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/the-confluence-between-religion-and-science/) I began to discover two things.

First, those who argue for a science only or faith only approach to life do so only for their own power.  Each group seeks to impose its view on the people as the only acceptable view.

The second thing I discovered was that many of the individuals that I studied in chemistry and physics were men of God as well as men of science (A Dialogue of Science and Faith | Thoughts From The Heart On The Left (wordpress.com) – https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/a-dialogue-of-science-and-faith/).

It is entirely possible that I could or would have come to Christ without having been a Boy Scout but that is clearly a question for another time and place. Besides finding a path to God through the God and Country award, I also began to develop an appreciation for the world around us. I cannot call myself an environmentalist but clearly, having seen the beauty of the Rocky Mountains when camping with my troop and seeing the physical wonders of this country and then seeing the awesome view of galaxies far away, I know that there is a Creator out there. And if there is not a Creator, then how was this all done?  (“Removing the Veil” | Thoughts From The Heart On The Left (wordpress.com) – https://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/removing-the-veil/)

I did not need to know that Boyle and Priestley were men of God to understand their work and what it meant to me as a chemist.  But knowing that their work helped them better understand how God works is also true for me.

Can I use the skills that God gave me (allowing me to use other words from Genesis that state that you and I were created in His image) and begin to work out the mysteries of the universe, from the moment of the Big Bang to the present day and perhaps far into the future?

The author and activist Stephen Mattson wrote.

Some people mistakenly believe that trusting in God requires them to distrust science, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of education, information, and truth.

But intelligence is a friend of faith, and ignorance is its enemy.  God loves knowledge and truth, and any faith that objects to either is terribly misguided.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote,

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge that is power; religion gives man wisdom that is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.

In a world that is fast dividing, it is the joint study of faith and science that will be one means of bringing people together.  For as science brings us knowledge of the physical world, faith brings us an understanding of the spiritual world and together we can bring the world together.