I got a bit tired writing about life in Canada, and thought of writing a series on vision and science in general. I’ll start with a scientific allegory.
In the middle of the forest there is a community of scientists building a great wall. Every study places a brick with the names of the masons, or people who sprayed graffiti on the original names. The beginning was relatively simple. All people had to do was to stretch their hand and place their brick. Those who couldn’t stretch looked for a hole in the wall, a missing brick or one that fell down, and place their own instead. Some pulled out loose bricks, created a landslide, and placed their own "new and better" bricks. The more fundamental scientist dug beneath the wall and placed bricks at the foundations. These bricks are so deep that nobody can actually see them. In order to be seen, most scientists just placed bricks beside others’ work to make the wall thicker.
As work progressed the wall became very high and very thick, requiring more creativity to proceed. Some people started throwing up bricks, hoping a small fraction will land on top of the wall. It is now dangerous to get close to the wall, since bricks are falling from the sky all the time.
The serious scientists take more disciplined approaches. A group of mathematicians is specializing in epsilon-bricks, where epsilon goes to zero. The idea is that mathematically the total height may still diverge to infinity, and they will never be unemployed.
In the middle of the area there is a group of theoreticians building a monumental tower using negative bricks. Whenever a negative brick is placed it is very unlikely that someone will ever be able to place a positive brick. Naturally, they started building from the sky. A construction engineer warned them not to get in, because the tower has no foundations at all, and in fact it is unclear how many floors are missing. But professor Tartamin replied "this is the beauty of the whole thing, can you build a solid tower in the air?".
Some desperate scientists opened a moving business. Their service includes transporting heavy math-bricks to computer science, and well known cs-bricks to economics and biology. They might pick a stats-brick, decompose it to pieces with svd and spread all over. No new bricks are created, but at least the wall is getting more colorful. Other desperate scientists adopted the automatic Turkish chess player approach. They manufacture a large brick and hide a small human inside to do the intelligent work.
As years went by science started to face a problem. They run out of new bricks. The best rocks are far away, and they cannot reach them. Without noticing, they built a wall around and got trapped inside!
