Some thoughts on scientism

Commentary on Jerry Oltion I had fallen way behind on my reading of ANALOG, so it is only lately that I have come across Jerry Oltion's essay, "What Science Means to Me"  [Jan/Feb 2012].  The Perceptive Reader will be unsurprised to learn that it means everything to him.  "My approach to life is scientific, and what understanding I have of life comes through analytic thought."  Evidently, synthetic thought is not to be used.  One imagines him waking to a clear blue sky and seeing stretched above him... the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight.  Well and good.  So do we all, whether we know it or not, and a knowledge of how the sky appears blue adds a lagniappe of pleasure.  (Saving only that there is something in the qualia of the sensation of blue that cannot be captured by light wave scattering or neurobiology.  More on this later.) 

For another 'tude, consider Werner Heisenberg.  While walking with Heisenberg one day, the physicist Felix Bloch, who had just read Weyl's Space, Time and Matter, felt moved to declare that space is simply the field of linear equations.  Heisenberg replied, "Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it." "What he meant," Bloch later wrote, "was that it was dangerous for a physicist to describe Nature in terms of idealized abstractions too far removed from the evidence of actual observation."  Let us explore this dichotomy.  
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