Progress in Earth System Science: What Does It Take to Make Our Ideas Clear? - Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach in Earth System Science - page 28

records (Dansgaard et al. 1984 ; Oeschger et al. 1984 ) indicating different climate
states with different ocean modes of operation (like on and off states of a
mechanical machine). This idea has been indeed followed by numerical and ana-
lytical models using EMICs (Ganopolski and Rahmstorf 2001 ), low-dimensional
systems (Stocker and Johnsen 2003 ; Kwasniok and Lohmann 2009 ), and full
GCMs (Zhang et al. 2014 ).
Another example in the Earth system is the term (Russil and

Nyssa 2009 ). Common of all these metaphors is that they link to already established
ideas and pictures across different cultural and scienti

“ tipping points ”

c traditions (Peirce 1878 ;

Br ning and Lohmann 1999 ). As described above, these ideas can be used to build

and test hypotheses against observations and comparing observations to theory-
based prediction (Weyl 1927 ; Manduca and Kastens 2012 ; Tewksbury et al. 2013 ).
One has to be aware that in most of our approaches, we use implicit models (quite
often not well articulated models) where a clari

ü

cation through a metaphor or a

conceptual model would help and such simpli cation is of great value for inter-

disciplinary research. The language expressing the scienti c discoveries could be

seen as important as the knowledge about the discovery itself (Weyl 1927 ).

Emergence and decline of scienti c paradigms can be even described by mathe-

matical models of consensus and opinion formation using agents and multiple states
(Bornholdt et al. 2011 ).
While it is certainly important to know how to make our ideas clear, they may be
ever so clear without being completely true. One prominent example of disagree-
ment between different schools is in the foundation of quantum mechanics. 3 On the
other hand, we expect that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough,
will give a solution to the question to which they are applied due to a steady
increase in the number of competing ideas and hypotheses. A theory is a self-
consistent description and general thinking with some predictive power. In this
sense, the statistical quantum theory was favored because of its power of explaining
experiments. Nevertheless, it can be only preliminary until a better, simpler, more
consistent theory appears which can explain more experiments and phenomena.
The process described in Fig. 1 seems to be a proper description of testing again and
again the hypotheses in the field of Earth System Science and beyond.

3 Born, Pauli, Heisenberg and others claimed the double nature of all corpuscles (corpuscular and
wave character), giving the final solution in the statistical quantum theory (e.g., Bohr 1928 ). The
strength of this theory is that it provides a theoretically complete description of a system involving
only statistical quantities like probabilities concerning the measurable quantities of this system.
Einstein argued that this did not satisfy a theory, because the complete description of any indi-
vidual real situation existed irrespective of any act of observation or substantiation (Einstein 1949 )
and favored a non-statistical interpretation.