I think that saying that science is a scam (or another kind of ‘faith’) is intellectually dishonest. Adam Gopnik, in his New Yorker article “Is Science Kind of a Scam?,” makes a number of logical fallacies and erroneous claims about science. These are common misconceptions about science so I think it’s worthwhile and beneficial to discuss a few of them in rebuttal to his widely circulated article. I might add that many scientists do not spend enough time to refute ‘anti-science.’ Unfortunately this is at the expense of a scientifically illiterate population that can be duped by authors such as Gopnik.
It’s possible that there are many people who believe the things that they hear out of conformity (or “out-of-faith”) but these are not ‘good scientists’ or critical thinkers. Good scientists are true 'scientific skeptics' who want to see the empirical evidence. There is a hierarchy of knowledge from which one can gain insight and wisdom. To say that there is no way of knowing is to claim that all truth is relative (truth relativism), and that deters us from searching to find the truth. One cannot possibly research everything that there is study, so one defers to the experts who sift through the data for us, and then tell us their findings. One could degrade this process by calling it a kind of “faith,” like Gopnik does, but that seems to be drastically missing the point. To some degree we take one’s word for what we read in 'Nature' magazine or 'Scientific American,' because the authors and editors have the credentials and qualifications backed by research institutions. These journals are peer-reviewed and go through a rigorous process of fact-checking and correction before publication. They are careful not to publish false or misleading information. It’s not having ‘faith’, but rather trust and confidence in a method of acquiring knowledge and epistemology (how we know what we know) that works.
What makes science great is that anyone can help with the process, as long as one is courageous enough to test the limits of one’s own understanding. That is the beauty of the 21st century: science has become democratized. One does not need to be an evolutionary biologist in order to grasp the fundamentals of evolution. One does not need to be an astrophysicist to share in the wonders of the cosmos. One does not need to be a physicist to become curious about the nature of atoms and subatomic particles. Granted, it’s not easy to understand some of these concepts- that goes with the territory- but it can be done.
Of course there are limits to our knowledge. After all, we are only human. Also, there are human biases which often enter into science and there are often implicit biases in specific fields. It's unfortunate when people interpret one specific bias (or simply a “quack”) as a reason to write-off the entire scientific method and scientific achievements of humanity as a “scam." Yes, scientists are human and humans are fallible, but the scientific method takes this into account. It has error-correcting measures that make sure that one’s findings conform to reality and not conform to the preconceived ideas of what the experimenter wanted to discover. That’s why a good experiment is replicable. Scientists encourage others to repeat the experiment/observations to test their results. If one wishes to challenge/disprove a "scientific theory” (a scientific fact) then one must devise an experiment and testable theory which is more universally valid and fits the data better than the previous theory. Much of science relies on Karl Popper’s notion of ‘falsifiability’- that a good theory must have a way of proving it wrong. If one finds new data that does not conform to the theoretical framework then we must re-work the theory. Proving that a theory is false (or has “holes” in it) is a way of furthering our knowledge because every test result that supports the theory makes it stronger, and every result that falsifies a theory teaches us a lesson.
When one discovers a more accurate theory which overturns the old, this creates what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift.” Facts change as scientists find better models that approach a closer approximation of the truth of reality. This process is called learning- and it is necessary that scientists are allowed to learn and adapt with new data findings. It’s possible that there will be a "new Einstein”- a grand unified theory (GUT)- that will replace the current “paradigm” of the theory of gravity, but a lot of theoretical physicists like Lawrence Krauss & Neil Degrasse Tyson say that it’s unlikely in their lifetimes (StarTalk Radio).
I think that it’s intellectually dishonest for Adam Gopnik to imply that the 20th century paradigm shift in science (namely quantum physics in the 1910-20s) raises questions on scientific knowledge today. I think that this is a typical ‘red herring.’ The differences between Niels Bohr & Albert Einstein’s views seem to me like fundamental disagreements on the most valuable aspects/implications of the paradoxical equations regarding quantum mechanics. When Einstein referred to “spooky interactions” it involved the “quantum entanglement” of atomic particles in the Double-Slit experiment. Everyone was puzzled by how a particle can act both as a wave and a particle, existing in a "quantum state,” where according to the Heisenberg principle, the results of the experiment (the observed) become inextricable from the observer. Bohr & Einstein admittedly did not comprehend the vast implications of their own equations. For example, Einstein wrote a paper (On the Quantum Theory of Radiation) describing the fundamentals of LASERs decades before anyone found a practical use for it. A brilliant theory can be way ahead of its time and it’s true that it took a long time for theoretical physicists in the first half of the 20th century to adjust to the newer paradigm of Einstein's relativity. This should not be a point of criticism but rather a triumph of science. Science does not proceed by what one thinks is true. It proceeds by what experimental data shows us to appear to be true, even if the results are bizarre and puzzling as is the case with quantum physics. Shared understanding comes about through rational debate and collaboration.
Gopnik’s question, “Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics?” is therefore not a very practical question and rather a moot rhetorical point. The answer is that no one (or very few) in the 1920’s understood what was going on in terms of “non-locality” with the Double Slit experiment. The Einsteinian paradigm was brand-new and physicists were still conditioned to the “machine-like” view of the world from Newtonian mechanics. Plus I would argue with Gopnik’s claim that there was not “decisive debate” because (in my understanding) the paradox was later clarified by the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paper in 1935 and the collapse of the wave function was later explained by David Bohm (Bohmian mechanics). “Quantum entanglement” can still be explained by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. It seems to me that Bohr and Einstein simply disagreed on why or how the particles act with “indeterminacy” (i.e. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which shows that either a particles’ speed or locality can be measured accurately, but not both at the same time). Their misgivings about the consequences of the experiment is not a mark of sciences’ failings, as Gopnik implies, but rather a testament to these two scientists’ rigor, fortitude, and intellectual curiosity. I think Gopnik is right about the fact that the public could benefit from stories about these men’s lives but not for the reason which he proposes. We could show that science & physics equally involves brilliant creativity as much as the greatest art & music.
It should not be surprising that the nature of the universe eludes our understanding at the atomic level. The universe did not evolve to make sense to humans. Likewise, humans did not evolve to make sense of the atomic world. This example of Einstein’s equations reveals another characteristic of physics: that when we find answers to hard questions, it often raises more questions. This is a unique feature of scientific knowledge, that the answers lead to more questions which broadens our horizon on what can be known. This hypothetically unending set of questioning is often mischaracterized by dogmatists as a shortcoming of science- an example of its inability to find definitive answers about the universe. This is simply not true. It frankly shows the power of science in its ability to ask questions which we would not have previously thought to ask about the universe.
The author also appears to be intellectually dishonest to bring up Galileo & Copernicus without really discussing Newton’s laws of motion, or even mentioning Kepler who accurately discerned the laws of planetary elliptical orbits. The author cites a moon crater drawn by Galileo presumably as an example of ‘bad science,’ not mentioning that Galileo was the first to ever use a telescope to view celestial objects in the night sky. To me it shows a lack of knowledge in the history of science (anachronistic thinking) to not acknowledge how in the 15th-18th centuries science was still co-opted by the Catholic Church, and not to mention how Galileo was punished by the Inquisition for not accepting authority and forced under threat to change his public views.
Then Gopnik cherry-picks a theoretical physicist (Lisa Randall) who wrote a book hypothesizing that ‘dark matter’ is a plausible explanation for why large comets occasionally get flung out of the far reaches of the solar system towards the gravitational pull of the Sun. He ridicules this idea but I don’t see this hypothesis as a harmful one. Carl Sagan, in his book ‘Comets,' proposed that comets are simply jostled out of the Oort Cloud as our solar system revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And Sagan proved to be right about a lot of the things that he predicted, like the presence of organic compounds on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons. Sometimes the seemingly “wacky” and “out-there” ideas have relevance in science because it implores other scientists to test the hypothesis and prove it wrong. That does not mean that we take these notions for granted, or outright ridicule them. We test the hypothesis for what it’s worth. We sometimes discover truths by testing radical theories and we often make new discoveries when we choose to look in a new place in a new way. One can discover truths by finding out what’s not true. This is an example of the ‘natural selection’ of ideas in science. If a hypotheses is proven incorrect, one can adapt the model to better fit reality and re-test it. This is not a flaw of science- in fact it shows the flexibility & strength of science to change in the light of new evidence to work towards solving new & complex problems. The ‘trial and error’ method is sometimes cited as proof that scientists don’t know what they’re doing, but ‘trial and error’ is a way of arriving at knowledge when faced with a complex problem with numerous data points. The important lesson here is that it often takes a lot of error before one reaches an informative conclusion. It’s the nature of human inquiry into how the physical world works. Luckily the scientific method has an in-built error-correcting mechanism for determining what works and what doesn’t work.
To me, the line between science and magic is not so “fuzzy” or complicated. It’s simply the line between what is known, unknown and unknowable. The “lunar tides are occult” when they seem like mysterious unknowable forces; “the next day they are science” when they become describable as an interaction between the gravity of massive objects in space. What Gopnik seems to be struggling to point to is the fact that many times in the history of science, the biggest mental ‘revolutions’ occur when people come up with a novel concept which radically overturns the previous paradigm. For Copernicus it was observing that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the geocentric model. For Newton it was observing the existence of a force of attraction between massive objects, called gravity, which is proportional to the inverse square law. For Einstein it was that space-and-time are inseparable dimensions in one space-time continuum, and that gravity is due to a curvature in space-and-time. This ought not to be surprising that a radical new scientific idea is contrary and counterintuitive to what came before it. What makes it seem “magical” to the average person is that these discoveries were not made in nature but they were intuited from the mind with the use of mathematics. This is not ‘magic’ but perhaps just the work of brilliant minds that are able to unshackle themselves from the ordinary mainstream ideas of their time and use the new tools and instruments available to them. Scientists might seem like ‘magicians’ to those who do not understand science but this does not make it ‘magic.’ Although I would argue that learning about the wonders of nature can be a magical and often spiritual awe-inspiring experience.
Gopnik makes it seem like science is part of conspiratorial cover up. “Why,” Adam wonders, “weren’t we told about the puzzle until after it was solved?” The answer: because unlike religion, science doesn’t claim to know the answers before it does the experiment and gets the results. As an example, Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted gravitational waves as a consequence of his equations, one hundred years before they were discovered. Unless you previously understood the theoretical consequences of Einstein’s equations, this would seem like “magic” (although it’s fundamental physics using the tool of mathematics). It might seem like Einstein just made up gravitational waves out of thin air, but no. In fact, it took civilization nearly one hundred years to build an apparatus large and precise enough (the LIGO detector) to measure these gravitational waves. But in science, it isn’t until we actually get a measurement that scientists are able to confirm that something like gravitational waves exist. Adam Gopnik seems to be laboring under a common misconception about science and the history of science. One could easily look back and say, as Gopnik does, that it looks “retrospectively engineered.” We might ask post-hoc: why didn’t anyone make a big deal about gravitational waves before they were discovered? Well, duh. Physicists were making a big deal about it and searching for the answers- but no one else noticed. No one in the general public seemed to care (or needed to) because there was no evidence for it yet. Scientists must wait for the concrete evidence before claiming a new discovery, no matter how convincing the clues are. Gopnik asks “What makes science different from faith?” The answer is evidence.
It’s good in a way that people like Gopnik are skeptical about science but I question what their ulterior motives for doing so are. I wish they would use this same inquiry to ask questions about the universe and ask how we discover these truths. If one does not know enough about how science proceeds, one might be tempted to agree with Gopnik that “science is a scam.” In my view, this is a dangerous canard. It is not the right kind of skepticism- the kind which requires reasoning and logic to further our understanding. Questioning things is good, but sometimes asking misguided questions can lead us to a troublesome place where there are no good answers. Sometimes questions lead us to answers which do not make us happy because they challenge our preconceived notions and do not conform to what we want to think is true about the universe.
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