I like the following explanation of the difference between scientific research and scientific truth and how an emergent scientific trend becomes scientific truth (example: everyone now knows the earth is not the center of the universe but there was a time when expressing this truth got Galileo in some serious trouble). Posting for those with whom Ive had delightfully rousing debates lately about a topic which shall remain nameless: In science, when you perform experiments and observations, and when the experiments and observations begin to agree with one another, and they’re conducted by different people — people who are competitive with one another, people who are not even necessarily in your field but do something that relates to your field — you start seeing a trend. And when that trend is consistent and persistent, no matter who’s doing the experiment, no matter where the experiment is being done, no matter whether the groups were competitive or not, you have an emergent scientific truth. That truth is true whether or not you believe in it. On the frontier of science, stuff is wrong all the time. I mean, if I have an experiment — what typically happens is, if it’s an interesting result that nobody expected, the press will come, and then they’ll write about it and maybe my host institution will send out a press release which will feed this… state. And the press will say “New results: scientists say…” and then they say cholesterol is good for you. And then a few weeks later, cholesterol is bad for you. And the public is wondering, what the hell is going on? Do scientists even know what they’re doing? How come they don’t agree? Well, on the frontier, we don’t agree. That’s what the frontier means. That’s why there is a frontier; that’s the whole point of the frontier. If we all agreed on it, it would just be in the textbooks and we’d move on. So people often confuse the raggedy, bleeding edge of scientific research with the established truths that consensus of observation and experiment reveal. ---Neil deGrasse Tyson And like in the case of poor Galileo, public opinion lags behind scientific truth as we are making that transition from the frontier to the textbook, but eventually the public gets caught up and collectively shakes their head about how their ancestors could have ever thought differently.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 13:00:33 +0000
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