Have you ever wondered why social scientists
fight among each other over theories like kids fight over candies?
Why can’t they agree on a certain point? They deal with pretty much
abstract stuffs, is my answer. Looking at what your peers in India do you might
get tempted to make a theory that white is beautiful.
In Bollywood songs gori (white skinned girl) explicitly means
beautiful. But if you come to the land of whites (Europe or America) your
theory may change: people there consider other parameters in evaluating
appearance, even some of them prefer tanned skin. The problem is beauty is such
an abstract concept that you can’t reduce it into
some comprehensible entity that your mind can use to compare among
various subjects.
Let’s understand it with a better example. Do you doubt that a 6
ft Ram is taller than a 5 ft Hari? I am sure you don't. Once you reduce the
concept "height" into numbers, there is absolutely no difficulty to
compare. It can even be obvious to everyone that 5.9999 is less than
6... That is the beauty of numbers. It is difficult to judge the relative
academic merit of a student; some students may perform better in problem
solving, some may be good at subjective understanding. But once you fix a
question paper, you take an exam; then you can find the best student in your
class - the one who scored the highest mark. The best student may not
be actually the best, but in our mind (or in the minds of other
people) he is. That if a naughty kid has scored just 30% in your class, his
display of some good subjective understanding will less likely to attract your
attention. The problem earlier was you were not able to express the
abstract entity “beauty” in terms of some numbers.
Numbers can be joined to form more powerful analytical tools -
equations. How much could you have understand the power of sub-atomic particles
without Einstein’s E =Mc^2? Intuitively you may understand many of the physical
phenomenon around you, but nobody will understand you if you can’t transform
your intuitions into equations. This is the problem social scientists face:
without equations their ideas become personal opinions, which are hard to be
understood and hard to be evaluated.
Equations can give a scientist sheer amount of joy. More and more
beautiful equations can be made by manipulating existing equations. And there
also begins the pain: the main subject can be buried under equations of mutinous
proportion. Scientists sometimes do it to make their theory look elegant, sometimes
even to confuse readers.
