// Who the hell is Kuhn?
In my philosophy/social sciences class we've been reading about Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (I fact, I've got a midterm coming up this Tuesday :) Kuhn's whole thing is about how science is made up of different paradigms. Every paradigm consists of everything in the practice of science: the theories, the standards of evaluation (for what is considered valid/valuable), and even the composition of the physical world (for it is different for adherents of different paradigms). An important characteristic of paradigms is that they are incommensurable: they are 100% incompatible and it is impossible to compare them.
And this got me thinking.
If we go with Kuhn's view of science, wouldn't this mean that it is completely impossible to reverse-engineer alien technology?
// Sci-fi Moment
Think about all the famous "aliens arrive on Earth" sci-fi stories. There's a high chance that most (if not
all) of them depict the aliens as more technologically advanced than humanity. Space travel and all that.
What sets humans apart from our galactic counterparts is just how different we are from each other.
The aliens' technology might as well be downright magic to us plebs. Say, these aliens are benevolent
visitors who shares
with humanity what is perhaps the greatest gift: their science. Unfortunately, because paradigms are
incommensurable, their scientific knowledge and technologies mean nothing to us.
... But why is that?
When the idea for this blog came to me, the first sci-fi story I thought of was "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, the short story that the 2016 film Arrival is based on. (Great movie btw, give it a watch!) In this story, the alien heptapods perceive time in a circular manner—they experience the past, present, and future simultaneously—which means their language/writing, and by extension science (and how it's communicated) becomes completely incomprehensible to humans. Or, in other words, they exist in a different scientific paradigm!
1) adherents of different paradigms inhabit different worlds and experience different phenomena
Scientists in different paradigms perceive the world in insurmountable, contradictory manners. For example, when looking at the moon, a convert to Copernicanism does not say "the moon used to be a planet, but now I see a satellite". Instead, they would say "I once thought the moon was a planet, but I was mistaken". To the convert, the moon has always been a satellite, even though before conversion it has always been a planet. As such, truth is relative to the paradigm, and changes when the paradigm shifts. In the case of humanity and heptapods, we are inhabitants of different worlds in quite literally every sense.
2) adherents of different paradigms speak entirely different languages
In the case of sci-fi aliens originating from a different side of the universe, this might seem like a "well duh" statement. Of course the aliens wouldn't speak human languages, but this barrier of communication applies to science, too. Kuhn is very definitive/absolute about this. According to him, scientists of different paradigms have no shared language to communicate their differences. Even if they do share certain vocabularies and techniques, they are merely using the same words to talk about completely different and contrasting ideas. For example, what we describe as "gravity" is a force in Newtonian mechanics, while it's something else entirely in the general theory of relativity.
3) different paradigms have incommensurable standards of evaluation
While we might be inclined to say that the alien technology is more advanced and therefore superior, that is not necessarily true. We can't give neutral, objective evidence for favoring one paradigm over another, because different paradigms employ different standards of evaluation for what is considered "good" or legitimate science. Consider this: A Newtonian and an Aristotelian walks into a bar and sees a metal key falls to the floor. The Newtonian is gonna think the key fell due to the force of gravity, and thus dismiss the Aristotelian's claim that the key fell because it's returning to its natural place of earth. To the aliens, our modern science might as well be as bullshit as how we see Aristotelian science with their "all objects in the world are composed of four elements - air, earth, fire, and water". The reverse is equally as true, but we do not think of it as such because we perceive the aliens' technology to be able to solve problems (like faster-than-light space travel) that our current science cannot.
With all that said in mind, if one day we are given alien technology to reverse engineer, I doubt there's much we can do to fully understand it. Although that's not to say scientific advancements can't be brought about from studying said technology. Maybe if we study it hard enough, enough anomalies—things that we could not explain with our current paradigms—would pile up, and some great scientist(s) would come along and propose a new paradigm that better explain these anomalies and trigger a paradigm shift. Thus, the cycle of scientific revolution continues. But until we arrive at the same paradigm in which the aliens developed their technology, if that's even possible, what we hail as a marvelous piece of engineering remains out of this world, out of our comprehension.