Sometimes it seems like science has all the answers.
It’s easy to see why - over the last century or so,
the unimaginable has become commonplace in almost every aspect of our lives,
and we have science to thank.
Day in and day out, when we do any number of things,
we interact with direct proof that science works.
And so we trust it, without needing to know
the intricate details of exactly how every little thing functions.
This isn’t necessarily a problem -
trusting science can mean trusting doctors, scientists, engineers,
people who in the vast majority of cases are trustworthy.
But trust in the abstract concept of science,
- without a thorough understanding of what it is and how it functions -
is dangerous.
It leaves us open to misinformation, or bad faith disagreements
where opinion and scientific evidence are treated with equal weight.
And the potential consequences of that are catastrophic.
So let’s talk about what science actually is.
A good way to think about this is in terms of solving a crossword.
The more clues you solve, the more overlapping letters you discover,
and the easier it becomes to fill in the rest of the words.
As simple as this concept is,
it’s a surprisingly good analogy for the accumulation of scientific knowledge.
As we gain an understanding of a given topic,
we get clues as to how to understand other overlapping topics.
The more we come to understand, the better we can check our work
and the more confident we can be in our results.
Now, there are a few things
it’s important to understand about this “science crossword.”
First, it’s incomprehensibly huge.
Every question we’ve ever had or ever will have,
about every aspect of the universe
represents another word in this puzzle.
In fact, it’s so massive
that we don’t even know what most of those questions are yet.
Second, this puzzle is being filled out in pencil, not in pen.
This is because all science is inherently uncertain.
...which I’ll admit sounds a bit counterintuitive.
But it’s helpful to think of it
in terms of what writer and biochemist Issac Asimov called
“The Relativity of Wrong”.
He explained that over the course of human history,
as our scientific capabilities have improved, we’ve gone from
thinking the earth is flat, to learning it’s a sphere,
to finding it’s a slightly squashed sphere,
to discovering that it’s actually the tiniest bit pear shaped.
At every stage of this evolution we were, technically, wrong.
Just different degrees of wrong.
But to quote Asimov,
“if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong
as thinking the Earth is flat,
then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
This is what we mean when we say that all science is inherently uncertain -
it will always be a degree of wrong.
And while this may feel like a weakness, it’s actually science’s greatest strength,
because it prevents us clinging to any one idea too tightly,
and ensures that the emphasis is always on evidence.
And this brings us to our third, and possibly most important point.
Writing in a single answer on this crossword is a massive endeavour,
because it’s being worked on by the entire global scientific community,
and a word only gets filled in
when most of the scientists in a particular field agree on an answer.
Neuroscientists are doing a bit over here, astrophysicists are doing this bit,
geologists, meteorologists, botanists...
All of them working on different pieces of the same giant interconnected puzzle.
Well, except quantum physicists, but don’t worry about them.
This agreement within a community is known as "scientific consensus",
and reaching it is a complicated process which scientists don’t take lightly.
It involves making observations, asking questions, posing hypotheses,
rigorous and stringent experimentation,
publishing and peer reviewing of academic papers,
scholarly debate, scientific conferences...
But this level of complexity is by design,
because by setting the bar for consensus as high as possible,
which scientists do every day,
science becomes the closest thing
we'll ever have to real, unequivocal knowledge.
Or, to put it in Asimov’s terms,
scientists are trying to reach the smallest possible degree of wrong.
And this is why it’s important to understand scientific consensus,
and the huge level of work that goes into arriving at it.
Because when faced with a debate
in which both sides claim to have science on their side,
in the vast majority of cases it simply won’t be true.
Most mainstream issues which are commonly presented as topics of
heated scientific debate simply...
aren’t.
Scientific consensus on climate change, vaccines,
and whether the earth is flat, is clear.
Which it wouldn’t be if there were any real ambiguity in the evidence.
The bottom line here is that science isn’t a product, it’s a process.
In the context of our puzzle, what this means is that
science isn’t the crossword itself
- the collection of answers we’ve amassed over time -
it’s the steps that we go through in order to solve that crossword.
The ongoing process of asking questions, testing hypotheses,
collecting verifiable evidence and drawing conclusions from it.
And when we fail to understand or to engage with that process,
the word ‘science’ becomes nothing more than... marketing language.
And given that in modern society
almost every decision we make is rooted in scientific findings,
it couldn’t be more important to get our facts right.