People are Not that Great at Science
So I was writing a while ago about how brilliant the scientific method is. As far as I’m concerned, one of the biggest reasons that it is brilliant is that it’s self-correcting. If you have a better explanation - according to the rules of making sure it explains the facts, and it is testable - the it’s in.
On the other hand, people are actually rubbish at science. Bear with me on this one. There are essentially two types of people, people who are passionate about a given subject, and the rest of us.
To spend your working life trying to find out why something works the way it does you need to be passionate about it. To really understand all the nuances of a problem, you need to spend a lot of time with it, something that you only do if you are passionate about it.
This would be fine, except that people who are passionate about a subject tend to have a problem simultaneously being objective about it. If you have a hypothesis, that in your opinion is correct, but you can’t quite find sufficient evidence, you’re going to have a hard time either accepting or admitting that an opposing hypothesis better explains the facts.
You might think that this wouldn’t be a problem, but it really is. Einstein famously refused to accept that quantum mechanics was valid because it involves probability. Lysenko’s dismissal of Mendelian genetics had such an influence on Soviet biology that genetics in Russia was set back by decades.
How do erroneous explanations eventually die out? It’s sometimes described as a scientific revolution, but in practice the old guard retire and die, and new scientists without the same prejudices come along to take their place as the accepted leaders - in time they too will go the way of their predecessors.
When you’re tenatiously holding on to an opinion, you aren’t always right, you might just as easily be an obstacle to progress. People are rubbish at science, but fortunately they aren’t immortal.
Eventually truth will win. That’s how science works.
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I Believe in Father Christmas
My favourite Christmas song is I believe in Father Christmas by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Honestly, I’m not normally the worlds biggest fan of prog rock, but I love the wistful quality of this song.
It has some particularly English lyrics
They said there’d be snow at Christmas,
They said there’d be peace on Earth,
But instead it just kept on raining,
A veil of tears for the Virgin Birth
The song, seems quite grown up to me, especially for a Christmas song - it’s speaks about the loss of childhood beliefs inherent to Christmas. The belief in Father Christmas, belief that it will snow, belief in the Israelite, belief that there will be peace on Earth, they are all gone, and yet it is uplifting, for it contains a Christmas wish of plain ordinariness - something that might actually happen. Nothing miraculous or amazing, just the simple things of everyday:
I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave new year
All anguish, pain, and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
Merry Christmas everyone.
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Why I Like the Scientific Method
To my mind, science is a collection of explanations for how things are and work, together with a method for deciding what gets added to and removed from the collection. In school, we mostly learn about the current collection of explanations, but real science is all in the scientific method.
It was championed by philosophers like Francis Bacon, and essentially consists of using observations about the world to generate explanations using inference.
What tends to happen is that you have a hypothesis that things work in a certain way, and you create an experiment to test whether in fact they do work that way. All your successful experiments provide evidence that your hypothesis is correct. Your unsuccessful experiments provide evidence that your hypothesis is incorrect.
If there is evidence that your hypothsesis is correct and there is no compelling evidence that your hypothesis is incorrect then it will be included in the collection of explanations.
Nothing in the scientific canon is absolute. In general when a better hypothesis is found to be correct - one that covers the existing experiments, and explains some more things as well - the original explanation will usually be discarded. This has happened to lots of things, including ether, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and cholera is caused by bad smells.
Sometimes, explanations that have been superseded remain in the canon, because they are a useful approximation. Newton’s Laws of Gravity are an example of this. They have been superseded by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, but the calculations contained in Newton’s laws are easier (but still not always easy) to work with, and they are very good approximations - you need to be travelling very fast, for example, to notice that time isn’t constant.
What I especially like about the scientific world view is that it is inherently open to being wrong. In fact, I think it’s likely that everything we currently know to be true to be superseded in future by better explanations - ones that we haven’t thought of yet.
Embrace science, there’s a whole universe to be explained and we’ve only scratched the surface.
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