How to Science

Much thanks to This Dude.

It is probable that everything in this blog is wrong. It is either inexact or inaccurate in some substantial way. But I’m okay with that, because in a way all of *science* is that way.

This is… one of the trickier things to get right, when it comes to, well, thinking like a scientist. And probably one of the biggest reasons that anti-science conspiracies and so forth (Flat Earth, climate change deniers, etc) gain as much traction as they do. Because, well, scientists are almost always going to be proven at least a little bit wrong in the future, and that’s a good thing. It means science is getting better.

The key is to try to always be less and less wrong. Let me illustrate with something relatively simple and (barring flat-Earthers) uncontroversial. The shape of the Earth.

If I said the Earth was a flat square, I would obviously be wrong. If I said it was a cube, I would be less wrong–at least I’m acknowledging that it’s three dimensional, even if I have the shape all wrong. If I said it was a flat circle, I would be less wrong than the square (at least I have the round-ness), but differently wrong than the cube (I’ll get back to that).

So what if I said it was a perfect sphere? That’s right, isn’t it? Well… not quite. It’s not a perfect sphere, though the perfect sphere is a lot closer than the cube or the circle.

Ok, so what if I said that it’s an oblate spheroid? I’m basically right, but inexact. It’s a little more precise than saying “It’s basically round”, but I haven’t actually defined *how* oblate of a spheroid it is.

So, what if I did that? Well, then I’m more exact, but I’m back to being a little bit wrong. Because if I treat the Earth as a *perfect* oblate spheroid, even if I get the overall dimensions right, I’m ignoring all the lumps and bumps on the surface.

Ok, then, let’s say I somehow manage to get a perfect, to-the-atom snapshot of the dimensions of every hill and valley, every island and ocean trench, every grain of sand on every beach, and the whole bit. I would finally be perfectly right about the shape of the Earth–until one of those atoms moves.

And that’s just the physical shape of one (admittedly very large) object. Imagine how impossible it is to get more complex things–modeling weather and climate, tracing evolution of lifeforms, figuring out the properties of subatomic particles, and so on–perfectly right.

So, what am I trying to say, that scientists are all wrong, and we should all just give up and become poets or something? Nope. Because we don’t need to be *perfectly* right in order to improve the world with (and the world of) science, we just have to be less wrong. Like the “sphere” model was less wrong than the “cube” model. As long as we are getting answers that are closer to the true and exact nature of the universe than the ones we had before, we *are* making progress.

And sometimes just getting something *differently* wrong is a key part of the process. Time for a little science history here.

Back in the late 17th century, there was considerable debate about whether light was a particle (the theory favored by Issac Newton) or a wave (as proposed by Christiaan Huygens). Some experiments suggested one, some suggested the other. And according to the understanding of the day, waves had to move through a medium, and no one could measure or otherwise detect the “ether” through which light waves propagated.

By the mid 19th century, the scientific consensus was mostly that light was a wave, though they still hadn’t figured out the whole “ether” thing. But in the early 20th century, a few scientists, most notably Albert Einstein, figured out that, in a sense, light was both a particle *and* a wave, and there was no “ether”. But he might not have done so if he didn’t have, in the back of his mind, that earlier notion from Newton saying that light was a particle.

So, what does all this mean, with respect to how to do science properly? Basically, that you need to keep a good balance between skepticism and open-mindedness. You need to reject ideas that legitimately don’t match the evidence, but you also need to keep at least a little corner of your mind open for ideas that sound crazy–zombie cats, undetectable matter, teleporting atoms, holes in the universe, and so on–just in case they prove to be actually true. It can be a hard balance to maintain–admitting that you’re wrong is generally not easy, but as the old quip goes, if you open your mind too much, your brains will fall out–but it is absolutely necessary.