Welcome to Tech Talk by Kevin Kelly.

This talk is going to be available on Google Video.

And so we ask that you hold questions that are proprietary

at all to Google until the end of the talk.

So Kevin Kelly is well known around the world as the

editor-in-chief of the Whole Earth Review, and is the

author of the book Out of Control: The New Biology of

Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.

Today Mr. Kelly shares his ideas on the future of science

and the scientific method.

He's come to the right place because Google has an

important role to play in the future of science.

Join me with a warm welcome for Mr. Kevin Kelly.

[APPLAUSE]

KEVIN KELLY: Thank you.

It's a real pleasure being here.

In addition to being editor and publisher of an obscure

magazine called the Whole Earth Review, I was also one

of the co-founders of Wired Magazine.

And for the five or ten years that Wired was the center of

the universe, it really felt great.

And being here at Google feels like that again.

It feels like I'm at the center of the universe again.

And I use that in a kind of metaphorical way, but also in

a very real sense.

I define the center of the universe as that place where

there's the least resistance to new ideas.

And I feel that, in some ways, this is the

center of the universe.

And it's a real privilege to be talking at a place where

there's probably the least resistance to new great ideas.

And what I want to spend a few minutes this afternoon talking

about is something that I think is very important but

gets very little attention.

And that is the nature of the scientific method.

And I'll start there and I kind of end up at some cosmic

level, and hope you kind of go along for the journey.

I think that it may have some bearing to what you're doing

in the long-term.

So in addition to also co-founding Wired Magazine and

being editor for many years, I also am in one of the small

group of people who have been pioneering long-term thinking.

We have a foundation called the Long Now Foundation.

Among other things we're trying to build a clock that

ticks for 10,000 years.

And the idea of that clock is to serve as an icon in

encouragement to think long-term.

So what I'm trying to do a bit in this talk is also taking a

very long-term view of things.

Rather than just thinking of the last five years, the next

five years, I'm trying to stretch our perspective and go

back 1,000 years and maybe look forward to 50 years.

That's kind of asymmetrical, but it's the best I can do in

terms of the future.

So what's interesting about science is that science is the

only thing that generates news.

Science is really the only news.

If you pick up a paper, most of the stuff that's happening

is not really news.

It's just kind of repetition, a little of recycling.

But science is the thing that generates real news.

What's interesting about the news that it generates is that

it's often novel.

And when we tend to think of the long-term history of say

the scientific method or science, we tend to think of

the inventions that science generates.

And as an exercise, we sent a questionnaire around to a

bunch of scientists around the world that said, what's the

most important scientific inventions in the last 1,000

years or the last 2,000.

And you come up with a list. And you can make your own

list. But some of the nominations for the most

important scientific inventions or the most

important inventions over the last couple

thousand years was hay.

The hay was actually the most important.

This was actually Freeman Dyson's idea, that it actually

encouraged cultivation of domesticated animals, which

led to protein, which lead to a longer life span, et cetera,

civilization.

So that's one.

Another one is antibiotics.

That was a really interesting, great, and important invention

in the history of the world.

Paper, who can argue against paper?

And, of course, this auxiliary technology of printing, that

was obviously a very important thing.

The rudder allowed navigation of the world, and sense of the

whole world and encouraged trade.

So that was also very important.

Electricity, obviously another very interesting things.

Once we harnessed the electrons, all kinds of other

great and wonderful things happened.

What's important about that is that you can make your own

list, and that these are different inventions.

But I'm actually not really concerned about that because

science makes news, but we very rarely look at science

itself, the method by which these things come about.

And that's what I'm really trying to do.

So if you actually suggest to someone that the method that

we know of as science today if still changing, and that, in

fact, the scientific method may, in fact, be very

different 50 years from now than it is today, this is the

kind of reaction you normally get.

Because when we talk about the long-term trend of the

scientific method, I find that people are very puzzled.

Science changing?

Science will be different in 50?

The scientific method?

And I think it will.

And so what I want to do is kind of take a quick tour

through the evolution of the scientific method in the past.

And interesting, when I went to look at this, I found that

basically there is no literature on this.

There is no book about the history of

the scientific method.

And for something so fundamentally you

would expect that.

But there isn't.

So I sort of cobbled these together and I'm going to go

through very quickly just to give you a sense of some of

the things I think are important.

And one of the patterns that you'll see, I hope, is that

this is a lot about information.

We have the idea of indexing and cataloguing.

Books have been around for a long time.

And then you have this idea of indexing or cataloguing the

information.

Or you have a book that is the index to the other books.

And so actually some of the great inventions in the

history of scientific method was the idea of an

alphabetical index, was the idea of having an index in the

book, was the idea of having a catalog to all the books in

your library.

Then there was the collaborative encyclopedia

where you had more than one author, more than one expert

coming together, sharing information, and in such a way

that it was all catalogued and indexed.

There was, later on, several hundred years later, there was

the first laboratories where they begin to do experiments

actually trying to observe, and measure, and record, those

observations.

We had the invention of observational tools like the

telescope and a microscope which greatly enlarged the

scientific method because I, along with some other people,

believe that the tools of science actually move science

more than any other discoveries of science, that,

in fact, the way in which you have progress is by the

creation and progressive improvement of tools.

Then we had the controlled experiment, which was of

Francis Bacon's idea that one needed to have controls.

To do an experiment you have controls.

There was Society of Experts that began to share the

information and the observations

that we were making.

So they began to actually have kind of a peerage.

And then there was--

oops.

They got cut off.

I had a problem here.

This is [? Bolton's ?]

idea that real science required they be able to

repeat an experiment, that someone else should also be

able to do it at the same time that you are.

Peer review where they began to actually send out their

observations and have them peer reviewed by people who

knew about it and could either give them credibility or

verification.

And, then this is Newton hypothesis/prediction, which

actually he was making a hypothesis about something and

making a prediction that you should find

data at some point.

Falsifiable testability, Popper's idea that what really

counts in terms of a prediction is whether it can

be falsified, that that's the sort of criteria by which you

judge a hypothesis.

Then Fisher and the randomized design, he was involved with

statistical analysis, bringing statistics into the design of

an experiment.

Placebo, somebody actually had to event that.

That was not an obvious idea.

It took many years.

It was actually fairly late in coming, 1937, before the first

placebo experiment was done.

And computer simulations--

I'll talk to a bit more about that-- began very early.

Almost as soon as computers were invented they begin to do

simulations.

And then the double blind refinement, where you actually

have both the observer and the patient not know about the

experiment.

And finally, I think, a very landmark moment was where

science began to study itself, where the scientific method

became a subject worthy of the scientific approach.

So one of the things that's interesting about this is that

I began to think about, what about China?

Now the thing about China is that it did

not discover science.

But if you take a list of all the technological inventions

that China made, it's phenomenal and actually very

unknown in this culture.

Most of the technologies that China discovered, they

discovered not just a few years before the West, but

often, on average, maybe 500 years to 1,000 years before

the West discovered it.

So it was independent, and yet they did

not originate science.

And what was missing?

Here are some examples of the things that actually were

discovered in China: paper, printing, gun powder, compass,

the rudder, the stirrup, row crops, iron plow, wheel

barrow, cast iron, vaccinations, the chain drive,

suspension bridge.

They were using petroleum and natural gas as fuel, again,

thousands, at least hundreds of years before the

West came to this.

And actually going back to Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon,

when he began the scientific method, believed that four

inventions had more impact on science at his time-- this is

around the 1600s--

than anything else.

He said these four inventions which were paper, printing,

gun powder, and the compass, he said transformed our world

far more than any religious belief, far more than any

political or war worrying, conquering nation.

That those four inventions which, he said, whose origins

are unknown were the transforming

powers in his world.

And he died before he discovered that all four of

those inventions came from China.

Now so why didn't the Chinese invent science?

And there is actually no easy answer this.

A man named Joseph Needham devoted his entire life to

trying to answer this question, and it's now called

the Needham question, which is how could science and

technology which was so far advanced in China for so long,

how come China did not continue going that way and

actually come up with the scientific method?

And the answers, as I said, are very complicated.

There's numbers of strands to it.

Part of it has to do with an inability to separate the

political and the inquiry, the religious and the inquiry, and