The Swedish Academy announced its Nobel Prizes in October, recognizing the achievements of some of the greatest scientific minds in medicine, chemistry, and physics. Despite these celebrations, scientific advancement is usually not the product of singular brilliance or certain discovery. Often, it is the conclusion of long and potentially messy debate. Many today want us to distrust science for this very reason, especially those in the highest reaches of government. Yet, science derives its power precisely from this uncertainty.
I am a professor of theoretical physics and have devoted my life to testing hypotheses about how the Universe works. This pursuit has taught me many lessons. One is that there are myriad paths to explain scientific questions. With both social and natural sciences, a pursuit of the unknown brings with it challenging questions with often ambiguous answers. Another is people are people. While the scientific method is sound, it also may involve human bias through interpretation.
While the scientific method is sound, it also may involve human bias through interpretation.
For instance, in the natural sciences, the basics of the scientific method drive this process. A hypothesis is made to be thoroughly tested. One needs to substantiate it with evidence, check results against controls, and provide detailed accounting of potential uncertainties. Yet, like bumpers in a bowling alley that prevent a ball from rolling into the gutter, this methodological approach helps guide us to move toward a deeper understanding. However, just as bumpers don’t guarantee a strike, the scientific method does not guarantee “truth”. Instead, it provides a mechanism for checking, double-checking, and quadruple-checking a conclusion until we are fully satisfied.
One great example in physics is the story behind Robert Millikan’s discovery. In 1923, Millikan received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work measuring the charge of the electron, which underpins all of modern electronics. Millikan’s experiment was groundbreaking and his win deserved. However, the precise result he obtained was actually wrong. In his lab at the University of Chicago, Millikan built a tabletop contraption that sprayed small oil droplets between two parallel, charged plates. By tuning the electric field across the plates just so, he carefully balanced the electric and gravitational forces acting on the oil droplet until it was suspended in midair. He argued that, based on the recorded electric field, he could infer the electron charge. While this is true, the recorded value, as we now know, was incorrect.
It took more than a decade’s worth of follow-up experiments until the measurements converged. Progress was slow and non-linear: some experiments confirmed Millikan’s results while others predicted higher values. The measurements finally began to settle in the 1940s and physicists realized that Millikan’s results were affected by an incorrect choice for the viscosity of air.
In a commencement address given in 1974 at the California Institute of Technology, the physicist Richard Feynman commented on why scientists were not able to correct Millikan’s result right away: “It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of – this history – because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong – and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value, they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off and did other things like that.”
While some may look at the story of Millikan’s erroneous measurement and feel distressed by the wrong turns and confusion, it is important to remember that it is a testament to the fact that the scientific process works. Despite the odds, including incorrect calculations and human biases, physicists still converged to a solution that continues to be reproduced to this day. It was not perfect and took several years to uncover the truth.
Nuance matters because without cross-examining the evidence, we may settle for wrong answers or simple solutions.
In today’s age of short sound bites and character-limited social media posts, there is less room for nuance. Yet this nuance matters because without cross-examining the evidence, we may settle for wrong answers or simple solutions. However, life is much messier than that. True expertise means spending time in the gray.
Hotly debated topics like vaccine policy and autism treatments, amongst other science-related topics, should be considered an open invitation to question and debate. Scientists around the country have a responsibility to join these conversations and journalists play a critical role in examining different viewpoints and determining whether they are grounded in fact.
Sitting with uncertainty can be difficult. However, I encourage you to avoid the allure of deceptively simple solutions. Embrace uncertainty. It could not be a more important moment to invest in the hard work needed to uncover the truth about our world.
