Science and Objectivity

Scientists and Objectivity

"Scientists should be objective. If everyone approached things by scientific method we'd get somewhere." Peter Baxendall.

The problem here is that if everyone was totally objective about everything then there would be no new ideas because ideas and theories are subjective items. They don't exist in the objective world until someone thinks them up and speaks or writes about them.

There are no "laws of nature" until someone comes up with them, and they last only as long as it takes someone else to come up with new ones. The old ones are then ignored, forgotten if they conflict with the new, or are incorporated into the body of knowledge if they don't.

Science is not objective; science is subjective, first and foremost. And throughout the ages it has suffered because scientists could not accept new ideas. They could accept new facts, and fit them to existing theories somehow, but accepting new ideas was difficult. That is caused by a lack of confidence. Not confidence about facts or theories, but self-confidence and being able to be wrong.

Many people (of both the scientific and non-scientific persuasion) are intent on getting the facts, by which they often mean as getting the right answer to a problem. But this can lead to a state of mind which tends to rely primarily on the facts that they themselves have discovered, which they feel allow them to promote theories to explain phenomena as being some kind of final statement, or at least a stepping stone to The Truth.

What is really necessary is to be able to produce a theory which fits the facts and yet still be able to accept it is wrong. In other words, have confidence that you are wrong even though your solution appears to be the correct one.

Unfortunately there are those who, because their theories fit the facts, assume they are right. And because they are confident this is so, they then have to endure a conflict within themselves when either the facts change, or a new theory, which contradicts their existing one, also fits the facts.

Hifi is a classic case of the push and pull between subjectivity and objectivity.  Advocates of various good sounding pieces of equipment often assume that this is due to a particular feature even though other items without that feature sound good to others, despite apparently inferior objective measurements, thereby leading to conflict such as that between belt and direct drive enthusiasts.

Which leads us back to subjectivity again, so really we don't get anywhere at all when value judgements are involved, as in the anti-skate debate. In that case, there are facts and opinions, and the conflict arises because the facts appear to contradict the opinions. What happens then is that some people hold that, because of the facts, opinions on sound quality must be wrong. Others hold that because of their opinions regarding sound quality, the facts are irrelevant.

It's all very like politics, where politicians love to think they are dispensers of the The Truth, and are happy to quote facts when its suits them and condemn Fake News when it suits them.

The reality is that facts change with new information,  and all news is fake, given that the complete, whole story is never told. The best you can do is find out as much as you can for yourself and make up your own mind.

Personally, I just let people have their opinions regarding whether or not something sounds good. There are no absolutes, not in hifi nor in life.

Distortion

In some circles it is fashionable to regard distortion as unimportant.

And worse, ignore it altogether.

Distortion as such is undesirable in a system which purports to reproduce accurately an original recording.

If someone prefers a piece of equipment which has higher distortion figures of whatever kind, that is their preference, but it doesn't follow that low or ultra low distortion is in some way wrong.

No distortion at all is perfection.

But sometimes a fault or two adds a human touch.

Does Form Follow Function?

Form Follows Function. It is a great soundbite, but until the form is established, there is no way to know whether or not it performs its intended function, except in theory. And, as is well known, theories are human constructs, prone to error. So, even with our mathematics and physics we have to try things out first.

The intention of FFF, in relation to its original architectural context, was to simply emphasise the practical, at the expense of the ornamental. However that has little to do with the way it is often interpreted by designers of all sorts of products today, namely that the function (what the designer thinks is required) should determine the form (what the designer thinks is the best way to serve that function).

Immediately the problem becomes apparent: for this method to work, the designer has to actually know all the requirements for the item being designed, and then he has to actually know how to achieve it. Who can have absolute knowledge without experience first? No one.

So, the designer makes his item, it does a reasonable job, he redesigns it, it gets better, he refines it further, it gets better still. Then usually another designer comes along with a new concept that the first designer hadn't even thought of, and makes it even better.

So the way the item functions governs its new form. And the way that form functions governs further new forms. It is an evolutionary process, not a prescriptive one. Louis Sullivan should really have reversed the statement, and said instead: "Function ever follows form", or perhaps "Function follows form follows function follows form follows..."

What is it that we hear?

When we hear music, what is it that we hear? What is it that contributes to what we hear? We know there has to be a musician. We know that wood made, for example, the guitar we are listening to, or that wood made a turntable's plinth,  or a tonearm's armtube that holds a wooden cartridge body that allowed a mechanical interaction to be transduced into an electrical one. Without that wood there is no music. But it may have been metal that was used for the instrument, and hifi. Or plastics. Without them there is no music.

There are no monopolies in materials, nor in music reproduction. There is no one way - there are many. But within each way there is an interlinking, a unity which is unbreakable. We are not concerned with components, but their interaction; not with entities, but systems. And to try and remove one component destroys the whole. This is why comparing two different components within the same system only tells us which component works best in that system.

Similarly, we experience music, not just hear it. We take in stimuli from all our senses concurrently. We are not able to dissociate and exclude. It is part of the human condition. If there are no stimuli, or we are deprived of them, we generate our own in the form of imagination or hallucination. We also are systems, and to try and work at odds with this fact is bound to be worthless in the long term.

When we hear music, what is it that we hear? A pleasant melody? Musical notes? Bass and drums? Soundwaves in motion? Air being compressed and rarified? Patterns of Nitrogen and Oxygen atoms in space?

The silences or spaces in music are often considered to be just as important as the notes themselves. However,  considering the relative sizes of nucleii and electrons and their distance from one another, the spaces within the notes take on a much more intriguing role: for the notes themselves are 99.9% space.