De Scientia

-- For those who may have been expecting an April Fool's, sorry this ain't it.

I've always been interested in science, even as as little kid. Any ambitions I might have had in that regard were, unfortunately, dashed when I hit Algebra II in high school, and that was dramatically reinforced by freshman calculus in college. But I still have fun being a slightly adept layman, especially when it comes to astrophysics. If there's one thing that burns my toast, it's all the yahoos out there talking about science being unreliable, or wrong, or superseded by the unfounded and indemonstrable. So I'd like to say a few words about what science is and is not.

First of all, "science" is not so much a body of knowledge as it is the method by which that body of knowledge was produced. It involves the study of empirical data obtained by observation of physical phenomena. It does not embrace conjecture derived from anything outside of observation or demonstration. If you formulate a hypothesis, it must be true to observation, in the broad sense, or derived from the mathematics that describes the data. Science does not pull things out of thin air, i.e., "it can happen" or "show me this can't happen" the basis must be data not conjecture.

Second, science is not absolute; rather it produces the most certain information we can have given the present state of our understanding. That is to say, the conclusions science produces are not absolute, nor are they intended to be. Observations become more precise, more data is obtained, conclusions in one area need to be modified by new data in other areas. To put it succinctly: science expects to be wrong, i.e. it expects its conclusions to be superseded in the future. We once thought Newton had got it all down, explained everything; then we thought the same of Einstein; now it looks like Einstein got several things wrong. How do we know this?  Observations by space telescopes, among other things.

Part of the problem, I think, is that humans want certainty; now in this rapidly changing world, they want it more than ever. Let's get back to the old certainties, when we all knew where we stood! As I said, science gives us certainties that are valid given our current knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately, most people are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of conditional certainty. They want eternal and unchangeable truth, but this universe, and our species, isn't capable of obtaining that.

Let me conclude with a YouTube from my favorite German physicist, about the current chaos in our fundamental understanding of the universe. It's a striking example of old certainties crumbling in the face of new data. Enjoy!