Opening Pandora's Box

Regarding “Opening Pandora’s Box” I would like to focus on the Janus model that is presented. It is a fascinating system to use to illustrate the opposing – but sometimes surprisingly similar – views of the young and old science, the established versus the open-ended. The first diagram displays the dichotomy of the view points. The old being in favor of Ready Made Science, the hard and fast traditional approach, while the young represents Science in the Making, there here and now of science and the forward thinking application of those concepts. In figure I.2 we have the left expressing his desire to get the facts straight, this concept is certainly well established in the context of finding the structure of DNA. The facts are gathered from the texts but this presents a problem for Jim and he realizes that the right side, the young, proclaims that one should get rid of all the useless facts which is required to begin to fathom DNA’s true structure. In this way the views are not all that different and by seeing it both ways a clearer path is evident. I.3 brings into question quality and efficiency. Creating a debugging machine may be the most thorough way to proceed but certainly not necessarily the most efficient. The economic aspect of the machine and the discovery is more evident than ever here and unfortunately efficiency is forgone in favor of economics. Perhaps most interesting is the argument presented in I.5, the difficulty in finding truth. On a purely meta-level these are fundamental ways of attacking knowledge verisimilitude. “When things are true they hold” and “when things hold they start to become true” on the surface even sound similar, but at their core are the view that time affects knowledge differently and the absolute value of truth. The left sees the facts like the structure of DNA, as always being true, it has always been and always will be despite what we believe .; but the young sees this system in the opposite way, as things are not absolutely true until time proves it otherwise it was never true to begin with and the truth cannot be absolute. These concepts are at the heart of progressive and retrospective theory.