5/30/2020 Nobel Prize Winners and the Basics of What it Takes to Do Science at the Highest LevelRead NowMost scientists have ideas about how science is done, but those that have won a Nobel Prize probably know a thing or two that others don’t. Winning a Nobel Prize in science often means that you had an idea few others had and pursued it to discover something so important that it changed the world. So by virtue of having gone through this process, Nobel Prize winners probably know what it takes to do science at the highest level. Here I have put together a narrative regarding the basics behind doing this type of science, and I have supported it with a few quotes from those who made their pilgrimage to Stockholm to be bestowed the ultimate honor. The first step in the basics of doing Nobel Prize level science is training. With whom should a would-be Nobel laurate train? The German-British biochemist, Hans Krebs, who won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for the discovery of important pathways in metabolism, had this to say: What, then, is it in particular that can be learned from teachers of special distinction? Above all, what they teach is high standards. We measure everything, including ourselves, by comparisons; and in the absence of someone with outstanding ability there is a risk that we easily come to believe that we are excellent and much better than the next man. Mediocre people may appear big to themselves (and to others) if they are surrounded by small circumstances. By the same token, big people feel dwarfed in the company of giants, and this is a most useful feeling. So what the giants of science teach us is to see ourselves modestly and not to overrate ourselves. This concept is not appreciated by many who are contemplating a career in the sciences. In most cases, excellent scientists have been trained by excellent mentors, and excellent scientists are maintained that way by keeping the company of those who are equal to or better than them (more on that later). The next step is choosing the scientific problem that is to be tackled. Here I am not talking about a problem, I am talking about the problem, the line of research that will define a career and will be pursued probably for decades. The British molecular biologist, Francis Crick, co-recipient with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins of the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of the molecule of life, DNA, had this to say about this issue: The major credit I think Jim (James Watson) and I deserve … is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. … We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view. The importance of the selection of the right problem is something that is not understood even by many very smart scientists. The British biologist, Peter Medawar, who received a Nobel Prize in 1960 for his discovery of acquired immunological tolerance, framed this perfectly when he wrote the following about Crick’s colleague, James Watson: It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability - much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skillful than most young scientists; right up in the Jim Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. Those that ended up winning a Nobel Prize often had the vision early on in their careers to choose the right problem to work on. Once someone gets started in researching the right problem, the next step is asking questions and having ideas as to how these questions will be answered. But all scientists ask questions and have ideas. What is it that allows some scientists to make the great discoveries? The Hungarian biochemist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for research into how the body uses nutrients and for the discovery of vitamin C, explained what is behind the process of discovery in the following way: Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. And the German physicist, Albert Einstein, who won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for his work in Theoretical Physics and his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, explained it this way: To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. Finally, Hans Krebs (whom I quoted before) was quoted as telling the following to new researchers joining his laboratory: “I can teach you how to dig, but I can’t teach you where to dig.” This ability to “think what nobody has thought after looking at what everyone has seen”, to display “creative imagination”, and to “dig in the right place”, is something that unfortunately cannot be taught. It’s a talent like those possessed by high performing athletes, virtuoso musicians, or inspired painters. You either have it, or you don’t. Scientists, like athletes, musicians, or painters, can improve their skills over the years, but being able to perform at a Nobel Prize-worthy level for any significant amount of time is something that can’t be learned or acquired with experience. Apart from the above, once scientists are on their way to Nobel Prize level discoveries, what else do they need to do? The American physicist, Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics volunteered this wisdom: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. And along the way to becoming experts, scientists will make mistakes and will also see others make mistakes. This experience is important. As the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work in the creation of quantum mechanics, wrote: An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them. So what can scientists do to avoid fooling themselves and to recognize and learn from their mistakes? A possible answer to this question is: collaboration (the right kind). Francis Crick (whom I quoted before) had this to say about the right kind of collaboration talking about his interaction with his colleague, James Watson: If, for example, I had some idea, which, as it turned out would, say, be quite wrong, was going off of the tangent, Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice-versa. If he had some idea I didn’t like and I would say so and this would shake his thinking about it and draw him back again. And in fact, it’s one of the requirements for collaboration of this sort that you must be perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you are working with. It’s useless, working with somebody who’s either much too junior than yourself, or much too senior, because then politeness creeps in. And this is the end of all real collaboration in science. I believe the foregoing pretty much sums up the basics for performing science at its highest levels. However, I don’t want to give the impression that Nobel Prize level science is the only worthwhile science. Most scientists make incremental contributions to scientific progress and move their fields along the path of discovery producing useful applications. These scientists will never earn a Nobel Prize, but their research benefits society in many ways. Photograph of Hans Krebs by the Nobel Foundation is in the public domain and has been modified from the original. Photo of Francis Crick by Marc Lieberman is used here under an Attribution 2.5 Generic (CC BY 2.5) license. Photo of Peter Medawar from the Wellcome Collection is used here under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Photo of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi by Fortepan from the Semmelweis University Archives is used here under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. The photograph of Albert Einstein by Orren Jack Turner obtained from the Library of Congress is in the public domain. Photo of Richard Feynman from the Yearbook of The California Institute of Technology is in the public domain. Photograph of Werner Heisenberg from the German Federal Archives is used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) license.
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One of the cornerstones of science is reproducibility. This means that if one scientist performs an experiment and gets a result, then other scientists should be able to perform the same experiment and get the same result. This also means that if one scientist evaluates something and makes an observation, other scientists should be able to evaluate the very same thing and make the same observation. This is the way scientists convince themselves that what other scientists find is true. This is also how scientists build a consensus. But if the gold standard for acceptance of experiments and observations as true among scientists is reproducibility, what is the gold standard for the acceptance of experiments and observations as true by those who are not trained scientists? How is a layperson to decide if what scientists are saying is true? The answer to this question is that, to a certain extent, the criterion is also reproducibility. People interested in reproducing some results of scientific experiments and making the same observation made by scientists can also do it. For example, you see all those amazing pictures of planets and galaxies, but how do you know they are true? How do you know if scientists did not just create these by manipulating images? Well, you can buy yourself a telescope or go to a place where they have one. I’m not an astronomer, but a long time ago I visited Fuertes Observatory at Cornell University. The observatory has a 12 inch telescope with a clock drive mechanism to compensate for the Earth’s rotation, which means you can take timed exposures. These types of telescopes are no longer used by astronomers, so the observatory is operated by the students in the Astronomy Department and is open to the public. I spent several nights there and hooked up my camera to the telescope to take pictures of heavenly bodies. I took a photograph of the planet Saturn and its rings. I was also able to photograph Jupiter, and I managed to capture the two large equatorial belts of the planet in the picture. When I took a longer exposure, I could make out Jupiter’s largest moons, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io. These moons were observed for the first time by Galileo in 1610. I took a picture of the moon. You can clearly see large craters with a lot of lines radiating from them such as Tycho (large crater at the bottom of the picture) or Copernicus (large crater at center left of the picture). The light areas are called highlands, and the dark basaltic plains are called maria (seas in Latin). I was also able to take this picture of the Andromeda Galaxy with its two satellite galaxies, the dwarf elliptical galaxy NGC205 (the fuzzy bright spot below the center of the picture to the right) and the dwarf compact elliptical galaxy NGC221 (the large bright spot to the left of the center of the picture). So I verified that some of these planets, planet features, and galaxies that you read about and see pictures of are true. They are there to see for anyone who takes the trouble to look at them the right way. The above is just merely making an observation, but you can also perform experiments. I wrote a post regarding a famous experiment that you can execute in your own home to reveal that light has wave-like properties. Similarly, there are dozens of books, videos, and websites describing many classic experiments that people not trained as scientists can perform by themselves. So you see, you don’t have to take the scientist’s word for it, you can actually do these experiments and make these observations yourself! Unfortunately, there are limits to this approach. My photographs are nowhere near as fabulous as the detailed close-up pictures of planets and galaxies obtained by space probes or space telescopes, and I can’t build a probe or a telescope and launch it into orbit or send it to faraway planets. There are certain experiments and observations that require specialized equipment that is very expensive and requires special knowledge and training to use. There are certain experiments and observations that may involve cooperation between many scientists and hundreds of other people to make things work and may require years to carry out. Performing these experiments and observations in your backyard or in your basement over a few days is simply not possible. What do you do in these cases? How do you verify that what scientists find is really true? The answer is: you can’t. Like I wrote in a previous post, for some things we rely on several safeguards to maintain scientific integrity such as scientists trying to reproduce each other’s results and the reporting of scientific misconduct to research integrity agencies. But the question is: When hundreds of scientists from different fields come together and agree that their results point in the same direction and reach a consensus, when several competing scientists check each other’s results and find them to be true, when research integrity agencies and other scientific review boards find no evidence of scientific misconduct in the process that generated this consensus, do you then trust the science and the scientists? For the average person, the acceptance of a scientific consensus that depends on experiments and observations that are too complicated for said person to reproduce or sometimes even understand in detail, depends on trust. And herein lies the problem we are facing today. This trust is being eroded by those that seek to disavow science. There are many people who maintain that scientists are lying to the general public and faking or misrepresenting their data because they have sold out to corporations, the government, or other organizations. Among those who hold this view are those who deny the severity of COVID19 or the effectiveness of mitigation measures, those who deny climate change, those who are opposed to vaccination, those who advocate creationism/intelligent design, and those who accept various conspiracy theories ranging from 911 being an inside job to Chemtrail or flat Earth proponents Science is the best tool we have to discover the truth about the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us, and scientists are the specialists who train for many years to wield this tool effectively. Those who wish to subvert the truth to defend harmful products, promote political or religious views of questionable validity, or peddle conspiracy theories that are at odds with truth, know very well that in order to be successful, they must disavow science. This is because science is the only discipline that can prove them wrong. And the best way to do this is to break the trust that people would otherwise have in science. Once this is achieved, people become impervious to facts, and we transition to living a fiction. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission. In the last decade, scientists made amazing discoveries. For example, scientists managed to photograph a black hole, which is the remnant of a star that has collapsed upon itself (a supernova) creating a region of space with such a strong gravitational field that even light can’t get out. Scientists also managed to detect gravitational waves, which are the ripples that form in the fabric of spacetime when cataclysmic events happen such as the collision of two black holes. Another discovery was the finding of the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle associated with a proposed universal quantum field that interacts with other particles generating their masses. Finally, space probes sent to the planets made exciting discoveries regarding these worlds such as the way Saturn’s rings are formed (Cassini Spacecraft), the presence of water in Mars in the past (Curiosity Rover) and present (Mars Express spacecraft), or the surprising geological activity found in Pluto (New Horizons Probe). These are exciting discoveries that stimulate our imagination and sense of wonder and advance the frontiers of our knowledge of the universe. But wait a minute. How do you know these things are true? What if these scientists are lying? What if they are faking data and misleading the public? Why would they do this? Well, they could be doing this to keep getting their grants approved by funding agencies, or they may have sold out to the companies that make their multimillion-dollar equipment. How do you know this is not happening? Are you an expert in astronomy, space crafts, or physics? How do you know if the data are true? How do you know these individuals are not hiding their dishonesty behind a wall of technical mumbo jumbo and made up findings? How do you know there is not a conspiracy of dishonest astronomers, spacecraft experts, and physicists to mislead taxpayers and take their money? You would probably reply that you believe that the majority of the individuals involved in these studies are persons like you or me who strive to be honest and are genuinely interested in figuring out the truth about things. You would also expect scientists with competing views to double-check the experiments and observations of each other. Additionally, you would expect funding agencies to have mechanisms in place for reviewing the granting of funds, the results of studies, and the claims by any whistleblower regarding the mismanagement of funds or faking of any data. Finally, you would hope that any of a number of government and agency watchdog groups would notice if something strange was going on. And yes, all of the above are indeed the case. We acknowledge that there will be some dishonest individual or groups of individuals that will abuse the system, but we expect all the above safeguards will work to eventually weed them out. We also rely on these safeguards to rule out the existence of any Machiavellian conspiracy. But in any case, truth be told, if you are an average person, all the questions I asked and all the notions I put forward above are probably nothing more to you than a theoretical mental exercise. For you, things like black holes, gravitational waves, subatomic particles, and planets may be interesting, but they are not something that really concerns you that much or affects your everyday life. But here is my point. There are thousands of scientists who, much like the astronomers, spacecraft experts, and physicists alluded to above, are also finding out some amazing things in other fields of science. Climate scientists are finding that the Earth is warming due to human activities, and that unless we reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and implement green technologies, we are going to do great damage to our planet. Vaccine scientists are coming up with new vaccines against terrible diseases, and alerting us about the dangers of not vaccinating our children. Evolution scientists are applying the tenets of evolution to come up with useful applications that benefit our society, and warning us about the dangers of the scientific illiteracy that would be created if creationism were to be accepted and taught in schools. However, unlike things in space or in the realm of subatomic particles, climate change, vaccines, and evolution affect people directly. They are told they HAVE to use less fossil fuels and more green technologies. They are told they HAVE to vaccinate their children. Their children ARE taught in school that something that goes against their faith is true.
And what a difference this makes to some people! All those scientists who were “persons like you or me who strive to be honest and are genuinely interested in figuring out the truth about things” are now deluded, evil liars and cheats, or atheists. All those safeguards that supposedly keep science and scientists true and honest have failed in these fields, and all the science in the climate, vaccine, and evolution disciplines has become part of nefarious conspiracies to fake or misrepresent data, get money, cause harm, take away our liberties, destroy religion, or spread socialism! However, astronomers, space craft experts, and physicists are not different from climate, vaccine, and evolution scientists in that they all follow the scientific method to find the truth about the behavior of matter and energy in their fields of expertise. These people uncover the way our world and the universe works, and then they report it. All scientists do this. Why demonize and delegitimize some and not others? The answer is, as mentioned above, because what some scientists find in some fields challenges our behavior or our beliefs. This is one of the things about science that some people cannot deal with. Science is not just about generating pretty pictures and interesting experiments for show. The purpose of science is to discover reality. And in doing so, science may reveal that what you are doing is harmful to yourself, society, or nature. Science may also reveal that some of your most deeply held beliefs and convictions are not true. While many people welcome these discoveries and change their behavior or beliefs, others have a lot of problems in dealing with this and will understandably lash out at science and scientists. But that’s the way science works. Reality cannot be compromised. The Image of the Black Hole of the Galaxy M87 by the Event Horizon Telescope is free for public use. The Global Average Temperature graph by NASA is in the public domain. Some people argue that science is too conservative and set in its ways. They claim that science favors a herd mentality where scientists are rewarded for following the mainline theories and are penalized for dissent against the establishment. It is argued that this creates a hostile environment for radical new ideas that hinders scientific progress and slows down innovation. Is this true? Let’s look at 3 of these ideas that were rejected by science but turned out to be true. Mosquitoes transmit Yellow Fever At the end of the 19th century, diseases were considered to be transmitted through person to person contact, but the mechanisms of the transmission of diseases like Yellow Fever eluded scientists. The Cuban physician, Carlos Finlay, developed a theory that Yellow Fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, and he performed studies where he had a partial success in having some volunteers bitten by mosquitoes develop mild cases of Yellow Fever. Finlay presented this idea to the scientific community in Cuba in 1881 and later in the United States. However, Finlay’s evidence turned out to be problematic, generating many unanswered questions, and his presentation was less than stellar. His idea was met with derision and he was called a crank. For nearly 20 years he persevered in his research, which he funded himself, and continued generating stronger evidence and publishing it. During this time, the Scottish physician, Patrick Manson proposed (based on his earlier work on the transmission of a disease-causing worm by mosquitoes) in 1894 that the malaria parasite could be also be spread by these insects. A few years later the British medical doctor, Ronald Ross, proved that this was indeed the case. Towards the end of the century, Finlay’s idea started looking less farfetched and gained enough notoriety to warrant it be put to test. In 1900 Walter Reed carried out his famous experiments in Cuba that demonstrated that mosquitoes transmit Yellow Fever, and Finley was vindicated. Continents Move In 1912 the German geophysicist and meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, proposed the idea that the continents of the Earth are moving away from each other, and that they were once joined together into a great landmass he called Pangea. His evidence consisted of how the shape of the continents could be made to fit together like pieces of a puzzle, the distribution of both current and fossil species across continents, and how the geological strata in one continent matched those of others. Unfortunately, not only did Wegener lack a credible mechanism to explain this proposed continental movement, but he made several mistakes including overestimating the rates of movement. His idea of continental drift was panned by the scientific establishment and labelled a “fantasy” and “pseudoscience”, and he was publicly ridiculed. Through all this, Wegener persevered, refining his ideas and correcting his mistakes. However, it was only in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the new science of paleomagnetism, that numerous studies demonstrated that the seafloor indeed was spreading and that the continents were moving. Sadly, Wegener died during an expedition to Greenland in 1930 and did not live to see his idea incorporated into the modern theory of plate tectonics. Today the movement of continents can be measured with satellites. An infectious Agent with no DNA or RNA There are diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or kuru that back in the 1970s were thought to be caused by viruses that act very slowly. The American neurologist and biochemist, Stanley Prusiner, became interested in these slow virus diseases and managed to isolate pure preparations of the infectious agent. Prusiner found that these preparations contained protein but were devoid of nucleic acids (nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA carry the genetic information in all living things including viruses), and that agents that destroyed proteins but not nucleic acids eliminated the infectivity of the preparations. Therefore Prusiner concluded, based only on this evidence, that the infectious agent was a new infectious entity made up solely of protein. He proceeded to publish an article where he not only claimed to have discovered a new infectious agent unlike any found before, but he also christened this agent, prion, a name put together from the words “proteinaceous” and “infective “ (although “proteinaceous” and “infective” should yield “proin”, “prion” sounded better). The vast majority of scientists did not accept his idea, which at the time went against everything that was known about the nature of infectious agents, and a good number of them heaped vitriol upon Prusiner. The fact that Prusiner was a stellar networker and salesman of his ideas and managed to get multimillion dollar grants did not soften their attitude. Although Prusiner kept researching and making new discoveries about prions, experiments in this field used to take years, so scientists were slow to try to reproduce his experiments. Eventually others were able to replicate his results and the concept of prions was accepted. Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in 1997. Now let's go back to our question. Does science create a hostile environment for radical new ideas that hinders scientific progress and slows down innovation? Two things have to be understood about radical new ideas in science: 1) the majority of radical new ideas turn out to be wrong, and 2) there is usually not one or two of these radical new ideas but dozens of them. Which ones are correct and which ones aren't? Should the limited funds allocated for science be made available to everyone who has a radical new idea? The answer is, of course, No. Decisions have to be made as to which ideas are more plausible than others. Science tends to give preeminence to that which is established. If you want to upend established science, the burden of proof is on you. The truth is that the radical news ideas of Finlay, Wegener, and Prusiner were not backed by convincing evidence. Their evidence generated more questions than answers, and scientists were not moved to throw orthodoxy out the window, at least right away. The insults and humiliations that Finley, Wegener, and Prusiner endured are certainly regrettable and objectionable, but this has to do more with human nature than with science. However, as more and better evidence was generated, questions were answered, errors were corrected, and experimental results were replicated, their ideas were accepted. They were right, and the establishment was wrong. But let’s be clear on something, the initial rejection of their ideas was totally warranted, even if they did turn out to be true. The photos of Carlos Finlay and Stanley Prusiner, and the photo of Alfred Wegener from the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg are all in the public domain. There are certain sayings “out there” that are repeated over and over by those who want to delegitimize science and support pseudoscience and fantastical claims. One saying that you often hear is, “Science can’t prove a negative”. What is meant by this? A “negative” is a claim expressed in negative form. So “ghosts exist” is the positive form of a claim whereas “ghosts do not exist” is the negative form of the claim. It is argued that the positive claim “ghosts exist” is provable, because all you have to do is demonstrate the existence of at least one ghost for it to be true. However, it is maintained that the claim “ghosts do not exist” is unprovable because no matter how many times you investigate the existence of an alleged ghost and come up empty handed, you will never exclude the possibility that there is a ghost somewhere. However, science proves negatives all the time. The key to doing this is defining the characteristics of whatever it is we wish to find, and, if applicable, circumscribe its presence in space and time. Defining the characteristics of what we wish to investigate allows us to come up with a method of detection. Stating where and when what we wish to investigate should be, allows us to perform the detection at the right place and time. If we then proceed to perform the detection at the stated place and time and we find nothing, we can conclude that an entity with the specified characteristics that we looked for at the stated place and time doesn’t exist, because if it existed, we would have detected it. A famous example of this is the so called Michelson-Morley experiment. When it was determined that light had the characteristics of a wave, the question arose as to through which medium light traveled. Sound waves travel through solids, liquids, and gases as compression waves, so light was proposed to travel forming waves in a medium that was called “aether”. Two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, worked out how light would interact with this alleged “aether” and performed several experiments in 1887 to measure this interaction. The overall conclusion of these experiments was that the “aether” did not exist, and similar experiments conducted since then with ever increasing precision have confirmed the results. The above procedure can also be applied to things like claims for the existence of ghosts. Of course, if the proponents of the existence of ghosts and other paranormal occurrences cannot define the characteristic of the phenomena whose existence they advocate or when and where they occur with any degree of certainty, then there are serious concerns regarding whether these claims have any merits from a scientific point of view. We might as well discuss how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Here we are better served by applying Alder’s Razor (what cannot be settled by experiment or observation is not worth debating). Another saying related to the one we dealt with above that is often encountered is that “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. What is meant by this is that no matter how many times we perform tests or make observations to ascertain the existence of something such as, for example, a medical effect, if we find no evidence of its existence, we cannot conclude that it doesn’t exist. This argument is frequently made by those who advocate products and treatments of dubious value or those who are hell-bent on defending disproven propositions. The idea is that no matter how much evidence to the contrary, there MAY BE an effect that the studies may have missed. The problem with this thinking is that a carefully designed series of robust studies can be carried out to evaluate the existence of an effect of a certain magnitude. The point is not whether there is a very small effect. The point is whether there is an effect of practical importance.
For example, many people were concerned that the vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) caused autism. In response to this, scientists carried out several studies evaluating possible risks of autism as a result of vaccines which all in all included hundreds of thousands of children. No significant association between autism and this vaccine was found. Could there nevertheless be a very small effect that was not detected by the studies? Yes, but such an effect would be so small as to be of no practical importance, especially compared to the risks of unvaccinated children contracting measles, mumps, and rubella. One final saying that pops up among the pseudoscience crowd is that concerning products or therapies that have not yet been investigated. When unresearched products or therapies used by people come under criticism, their proponents argue that, “There is no evidence that they don’t work.” Thus what they are saying is that, because it has not been found to be ineffective, it is OK to keep on using it, even though this argument should cut both ways (if there is no evidence it works you should not use it). This line of reasoning essentially argues that ignorance is a valid reason to justify using a product or therapy. It treats ignorance as evidence! Even if the effectiveness of a particular product or therapy has not been investigated, there may be grounds for serious skepticism regarding its use based on other considerations. For example, if a new untested homeopathic product is introduced into the market, we would be justified in being skeptical regarding its effectiveness because the principles on which homeopathy is claimed to work violate well-established chemical laws. Additionally, the best designed studies assessing the effectiveness of existing homeopathic products have yielded negative results, so a new product will not fare any better. So to recap, science CAN prove a negative, absence of evidence CAN be evidence of absence, and ignorance IS NOT evidence. Photo of the plaque commemorating the Michelson-Morley experiment by Alan Migdall is used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0). I have tried to explain in my blog how scientific theories arise, and how the initial theories generated in an emerging scientific field are very different from the fully developed theories of a mature scientific field. In this post I will attempt to do this again using the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant. This is a story found in Hindu and Buddhist texts dating back more than 3,000 years. It has been used in religious and philosophical contexts to illustrate how we often think we know the truth, even though we have just grasped only part of it. The most famous version in English is the poem entitled “The Blind Men and the Elephant” written by the poet John Godfrey Saxe. So let’s imagine a physical reality which in our case has the shape of an elephant, and that we will call “the elephant”. Let’s also imagine an emerging scientific field that is trying to research said elephant. The field is represented by six scientists who seek to figure out how the elephant looks. But the scientists are in the dark as shown by the blindfolds they are wearing. So each of these scientists approaches the elephant and begins to research it. In our story this is exemplified by the scientists touching the elephant. Scientist 1 grabs the elephant by the tail and puts forward the hypothesis that the elephant is like a rope. Scientist 2 touches the elephant’s leg and puts forward the hypothesis that the elephant is like a tree. Scientist 3 touches the side of the elephant and puts forward the hypothesis that the elephant is like a wall. Scientist 4 touches the ears of the elephant and puts forward the hypothesis that the elephant is like a fan. Scientist 5 grabs the tusk of the elephant and puts forward the hypothesis that the elephant is like a spear. Scientist 6 feels the moving trunk of the elephant and puts forward the hypothesis that the elephant is like a snake. In the various versions of the parable, the blind men quarrel with each other, as each is one is convinced that their version of what the elephant looks like is the truth. The parable ends mocking their hubris at thinking that each one knows the truth when really none of them knows the whole truth (the real shape of the elephant). However, there is one fundamental difference between these versions of the parable and mine. In my version, the blind men are scientists, and that makes all the difference! These scientists are not working in isolation. They discuss and cooperate with each other. Mind you, some of these scientists may argue very forcefully in favor of their particular idea of how the elephant looks, and others may argue back just as forcefully that they are wrong. However, these scientists go to meetings, give presentations, face each other, exchange information, and publish their research results regarding the shape of the elephant in peer-reviewed journals. Each scientist tries to reproduce the observations made by others. The scientist who touched the tail and concluded that the elephant was like a rope, also touches the leg of the elephant, and realizes that he should modify his original hypothesis to incorporate this new information. Thus he proposes that the elephant looks like a tree with a rope sticking out of it. The scientist who touched the side of the elephant and concluded that the elephant was like a wall, also touches the ear, and realizes he should modify his original hypothesis to include this information. He now proposes that the elephant looks like a wall with a fan sticking out of it. The same happens with the other scientists. As new information becomes available, scientists modify their original views and try to harmonize all the knowledge about the elephant. Mind you, this can be a messy process that may be hampered by methodological difficulties. For example, some scientists may not reach high enough to touch the ear, or may not be nimble enough to catch the tail and they remain unconvinced of claims that the elephant is like a fan or a rope. Nevertheless, after a period of time, a majority of these scientists come to an agreement and put out the first theory regarding how the elephant looks! As you can see from the image, this theory about how the elephant looks is a very preliminary one. However, there is something “elephant-like” about it. Clearly the theory has grasped some aspects of the reality the scientists were studying. In its present form the theory may even have some usefulness, but the theory is clearly incomplete. It does not reflect the full reality of how the elephant looks. Nevertheless, this theory represents a group effort. The scientists are trying to fit all the relevant information that is available to come up with the answers. So the research continues. A scientist may find that the elephant has not one leg but four. The scientist reasons, “Hmm, the elephant is like four trees? That doesn’t make sense.” Another may find that the surface of the wall is much larger and is connected to the four legs at the bottom and completely surrounds the elephant at the middle. He may think, “What type of wall is this? The elephant may not be like a wall after all.” As more observations keep piling in, the original theory is found to be unsatisfactory and is replaced by one that incorporates the new observations. This new theory is more complete and its image would look more like an elephant. Scientists develop new methods to investigate the shape of the elephant generating more information. Scientists from other disciplines may also take up the research of how the elephant looks bringing in their expertise and new ideas. As this process keeps going and the scientific field that studies the elephant reaches maturity, a theory is put forward that explains the majority of the observations regarding how the elephant looks. The theory is used to make predictions that turn out to be true and generates practical applications. The scientists stop arguing with each other regarding the most relevant aspects of what the elephant looks like, and they reach a consensus. Thus something has happened that has never happened in any of the previous versions of the parable. The scientists studying the elephant don’t have their blindfolds on anymore. They are able to behold the true shape of the elephant. By working together, exchanging information, trying to reproduce what others did, and trying to come up with explanations for all the observations, they have discovered the truth! That is how science works. The images by Paula Bensadoun can only be used by permission from the author. With this post I celebrate 100 posts in my blog! Back in 2017, I decided I was going to blog about science. I am trained in the ways of science. I can read, understand, and correctly interpret most scientific information, and if I don’t understand it right away, I know where to find material that will help me understand it. Therefore, I could sit and wait for the next interesting scientific article, read it, figure out how to explain it to laypeople, and then blog about it. It is not my intention to belittle this approach. I think it is important to present science to people in a way they can understand it, but the thing is everyone is doing that, and I had other concerns. As a young man, I was fascinated by science because, unlike other ways of discovering the truth about the behavior of matter and energy in our universe, science actually worked. Not only that, but science is a methodology that can unite people of difference countries, races, ethnicities, and social, political, philosophical, and religious persuasions, making it possible for all to agree on the truthfulness of certain pronouncements about reality. But early on in my career I was even more fascinated by the misconceptions that people harbor about science and the natural world. I met people who would talk to me about clairvoyance, telepathy, demonic possession, or ghosts as if these things were true (they aren’t). I met people engaged in the practice of astrology, homeopathy, and faith healing that would tell me that these things worked and had been validated by science (they don’t and they haven’t). So while pursuing my science career, I formed a skeptics group and wrote columns for local newspapers where I tried to educate people about what is and isn’t science, how does science work, what are the limits of science, what masquerades as science, and why they should care. This went on for a few years, but these activities fell by the wayside as life and the demands of work and family intervened. Now fast forward a few decades and once again I felt the urge to engage in these activities again. However, things had changed a bit. The internet has made scientific information, which takes professionals years of training to understand and evaluate, freely available. Anyone can now pick and choose studies or ideas from the scientific literature regardless of their validity, and interpret them as they please to support their views. This has generated disinformation and the so-called “alternative facts.” Additionally, we have seen a resurgence of anti-science like never before. There are individuals, groups, and powerful interests that know that science can prove them wrong, and they fear science because they know science works. Therefore, these entities take it upon themselves to delegitimize science. We have seen the rise of the climate change denial movement, the anti-vaccination movement, various conspiracy theories, along with the latest incarnation of the creationist movement (intelligent design) and even flat Earthers. And many individuals within these movements argue that scientists are dishonest, have sold out to powerful interests, and therefore are not to be trusted. Because of the above, it is important for scientists to get involved in educating the public about the facts, and to fight back against the delegitimization of science and scientists in order to set the record straight. So to do my share, I started this blog and decided that it would cover several recurrent themes. One of the most important themes that I often bring up in my discussions of creationism and evolution or religion and science, is the need for science to temper beliefs, the need for beliefs in shaping the morals and ethics of scientists, and the need to keep these two areas separate from each other as per the concept of non-overlapping magisteria (to which I subscribe) proposed by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. This distinction led me to call my blog “Ratio Scientiae”. In the theology of the Christian philosopher, Saint Augustine, he identified two different but complementary types of reasoning, ratio sapientiae, and ratio scientiae. Ratio sapientiae dealt with knowledge of the divinity, whereas ratio scientiae dealt with knowledge of the physical world. Saint Augustine believed that the physical world displayed certain patterns and regularities that we could discover employing ratio scientiae, and I thought this described very well what would be the philosophy behind my blog. Other examples of recurrent themes in my blog are: 1) The need to understand how the scientific method works, what scientific theories are, and how the process of science can generate facts as opposed to notions that are tentative and ephemeral. 2) The need to respect scientists and their expertise while recognizing that they are human and make mistakes, but at the same time understanding that the fact that science can be wrong is its strength and the main reason why it can be right. 3) The need for skepticism to avoid having your mind so open that people will fill it with trash, but at the same time the need to be able to give up irrational forms of skepticism and accept the evidence to avoid, for example, falling in the trap of accepting conspiracy theories. 4) The need for science to not work in a vacuum, and accept that our reality is also shaped by beliefs that must be taken into account as part of the solutions to our problems. At the same time I did not want my blog to be one cryptic boring long hard to read deal. This is why I also often post fun and interesting things both in my blog, and in the “Interesting Stuff” section. According to my metrics, my blog receives about 600 unique visitors per month, each of whom reads an average of 2.5 pages. If you have been one of those, I want to thank you, and hope that what I have written has helped your thinking about some aspect of science and its method or at least entertained you enough for you to think that science is cool and worth your while. Thank you very much! Rolando Garcia Most people are interested in science and they admire and respect scientists, but I’ve noticed that some folks exhibit one of two extreme reactions. 1) Self-Disparaging: Scientists are smart. They talk about all these things and use all these words, and I can’t figure out what they are saying. Therefore I’m stupid. I was once trying to explain to a person not educated in science a specific scientific issue. I was trying to describe things in a manner as simple as possible, but I didn’t seem to be having much luck in getting the point across. In the end the person excused himself for not understanding what I was talking about, and then he added, “I’m stupid”. Whereas some individuals, like the one I described, state outright that their intellect is defective, or at least not up to par, others get defensive and either try to bluff their way through a conversation involving science or try to avoid it all together. Sometimes I even sense an animosity, an unspoken tension, or hostility when a scientist is around. It’s like some people are concerned that they will be exposed as not knowing enough or as not being smart enough. 2) Dismissive: Scientists seem smart, but it’s really all talk and jargon. Anyone can be as smart as scientists and talk science and read and quote scientific studies. Not only that, scientists are often beholden to the interests of governmental or other institutions that fund their research, and they lie, misrepresent, or fake their results when their data don’t fit the facts to keep on being funded. Due to the nature of my blog, I have had several exchanges with creationists, anti-vaccination advocates, conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, and so forth. These individuals believe they know more than the experts who have dedicated their lives to understanding a particular scientific field. These people normally laugh my replies off with off base comments filled with little emoticons and links to junk science sites or lists of scientific articles of low quality. I want to state here that both extremes are wrong. I believe the first extreme exists due to the popular perception of what being smart means, its value to society, and how scientists tally up to this perception. Regarding this, I want to make the following points: 1) As I have posted before, intelligence has many components. The fact that one person excels in one of these components does not make him/her smarter than those that excel in others. 2) There is nothing magical of mysterious about being a scientist. Although, science can be performed at several levels, the basic qualification required to be a scientist is to think like a scientist. Anyone who does that can be a scientist. 3) We all have areas of specialization on which we have become knowledgeable. A climate scientist may know a lot about global warming but they may not make the best salesperson, farmer, restaurant manager, secretary, truck driver, accountant, etc. 4) We must not dismiss the knowledge we have of our particular area of expertise compared to others. Being a librarian may not look important compared to working at NASA shooting satellites into space, but we all fulfil a role in society and benefit groups of people with our work. 5) For scientists, explaining what we do to people who are not knowledgeable in science is very important. A key component of being “smart” is finding a way to get the point across. As a scientist, when I cannot explain some important scientific issue adequately to my audience, I consider it my failing, not that of my audience. The flipside of the first extreme is the other extreme which I believe in recent times has been fueled partly by the vitriol unleashed against scientists by those aligned with special interests, or those subscribing to notions that scientists are dishonest or sold to government agencies or corporations. Regarding this, I want to make the following points: 1) When a person has dedicated their life to learning and studying an area of human knowledge such as a scientific discipline, this has to count for something. If you are not an expert in that area, suggesting that you know more than the experts is not only foolhardy but also disrespectful. This is nothing germane to scientists, as it also applies to any area of human expertise. 2) The scientific consensus achieved regarding issues such as climate change or the safety of vaccination is supported by many scientists from different countries and ethnicities who have different political, social, philosophical, and religious persuasions. They all agree because they have been finding the same things. It is risible to suggest that ALL these scientists have sold out in some sort of global conspiracy. 3) Scientists are human beings, and as such they can have moral or ethical failings and harbor contradictions. No one denies that. Most scientists are moral and ethical persons, or at least they try to be, and just like other groups of people in the overall population, the transgressions of a few individuals do not bear on the majority of scientists. So to recap, yes, scientists are smart and they know a lot, but even if you do not understand many aspects of science, you also are smart and have specialized knowledge about your own area of expertise that is useful to society. Additionally, scientists have the responsibility of explaining science to non-specialists in a way that is accessible to them and that will better equip them as members of society to deal with issues like the climate change and vaccination controversies. Finally, scientists, like other professionals in our society, also are worthy of respect and should be recognized for their merits and judged on their individual actions. As with many things in life, we are better served by avoiding the extremes. The image is a public domain picture from Pixabay free for commercial use. There is a joke that illustrates misguided science thinking. A man is in a public area screaming at the top of his lungs. When somebody comes over and enquires why he is screaming, the man replies, “To keep away rogue elephants”. When told that there are no elephants for miles around, the man replies that this is proof his screaming is working. If you think that is silly, consider the following recipe for obtaining mice by spontaneous generation (in other words, without the need for male and female mice): Place a soiled shirt into the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat. Within 21 days the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with the fumes from the wheat will produce mice. No, I’m not kidding you! For many centuries some of the best minds in humanity believed that life could regularly arise spontaneously from nonlife or at least from unrelated organisms. Some people went as far as outlining procedures to achieve this, such as the one presented above to generate mice supplied by the chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont. Presumably, this individual (who is no stranger to misguided scientific thinking) placed a shirt in a vessel with grains of wheat, and when he checked 21 days later he saw a mouse scurrying away. Therefore, he concluded that the mix of the wheat and the shirt in the vessel produced the mouse. What the above examples of misguided science have in common is the ignoring of alternative explanations. In the case of the joke, the alternative explanation obviously is that there are no rogue elephants nearby to begin with. In the other case, the alternative explanation is that the mouse came from elsewhere, as opposed to arising from the shirt with the wheat. The best scientific experiment is one carried out in such a manner that alternative explanations for the experimental results are minimized or ruled out altogether. The ideal scientific experiment should only have one possible explanation for the outcome. In order to achieve this, scientists use controls. A control is an element of the experimental design that allows for the control of variables that could otherwise affect the outcome of the experiment. In the case of the joke, the man could stop screaming to see if rogue elephants show up, or he could scream next to an actual elephant to see if screaming works. In the case of the real example, van Helmont could have placed a barrier around the shirt with the wheat to rule out that mice came from the outside. The use of controls in experiments is so commonplace nowadays, that it is really hard to imagine how anyone could even think of performing an experiment without them. However, the modern universal notion of controls as a way of controlling variables to rule out alternative explanations to experimental results did not begin to take shape until the second half of the 19th century, even though scholars claim that strategies to make observations or experiments yield valid results go back further in time to the Middle Ages or even antiquity. In science, the controls that are most often used are those involving outside variables that can affect the results of an experiment. However, the more important and more challenging variables to control are those that arise from within the experimenter. If the procedure to make an observation or evaluate the results of an experiment depends on a subjective judgement made by the experimenter, as opposed to, for example, a reading made by a machine, then subtle (and not so subtle) psychological factors can influence the result depending on the biases of the experimenter. I have already mentioned the famous case of the scientist René Blondlot who in 1903 announced to the world he had discovered a new form of radiation (N-rays), but it turned out that such radiation existed only in his imagination. Another famous case was that of astronomer Percival Lowell who, at the turn of the 19th century, thought he saw canals on Mars which he considered to be evidence of an advanced civilization. He was a great popularizer of science and he wrote several books about Mars and its inhabitants based on his observations, but the whole thing turned out to be a delusion. To avoid this type of mistake, many experiments that rely on subjective assessments employ a protocol where the observer does not know which groups received which treatments. This is called a blind experimental design.
An additional challenge occurs when a scientists works with human subjects. Psychological factors can have a potent role in influencing the results of medical experiments. Depending on the disease, if patients are convinced that they are receiving an effective treatment, and that their condition will improve, said patients can display remarkable improvements in their health even if they have received no effective treatment at all. To rule out the effect of these psychological factors, scientist performing clinical trials include groups of patients treated with placebos. Placebos are fake pills designed to mimic the actual pill containing the active chemical substance or ineffective procedures designed to mimic the actual medical procedure in such way that the patient cannot tell the difference. To also rule out the influence of psychological factors arising from the doctors giving patients in one group a special treatment, the identity of these groups are hidden from the clinicians. Clinical trials which employ placebos and where both the patients and the clinicians don’t know the identity of the treatments, are called double-blind placebo-controlled trials, and they are the most effective and also the most complex forms of controls. Unfortunately, the use of controls is not always straightforward. I have already mentioned the case of the discovery of polywater which was heralded as a new form of water with intriguing properties that promised many interesting practical applications until someone implemented a control and demonstrated that it was the result of contamination. Sometimes scientists do not know all the variables affecting an experiment, or they may underestimate the effect of a variable that they have deemed irrelevant, or they may misjudge the extent to which their emotional involvement in conducting the experiment may compromise the results. Designing the adequate controls into experimental protocols requires not only discipline, discernment, and smarts, but sometimes also just luck. In fact, some scientists would argue that implementing effective controls is not a science but an art. The art of the control! The Elephant cartoon from PixaBay is free for commercial use. The Illustration of Mars and its canals by Percival Lowell is in the public domain. I once attended a science meeting where one of the attendees was proposing the existence of a new metabolic pathway that was not recognized by the prevailing thinking in the field. After he presented the evidence for his pathway, in the next talk one of the other researchers presented the evidence against the existence of such a pathway. This second researcher then concluded his presentation by raising his voice and stating that he considered the proposed new pathway to be: “COMPLETELY IGNORABLE!” while he slammed his hand flat on the lectern once during the word “completely” and again during the word “ignorable”. The above story is not an isolated incident. Many fields of science have had their share of controversy often accompanied by vitriolic long-running feuds among rival scientists that seemingly resorted to using science, not as a method to discover the truth, but rather as a platform to hurl insults. And the situations that stir the most passions arise when conventional wisdom is challenged: the more revolutionary the idea, the more the attacks rain upon its proponents. There are quite a few examples of these occurrences in the history of science, but I want to mention three here. I have already cited the case of the American neurologist and biochemist Stanley Prusiner who in 1982 proposed the existence of an infectious agent made exclusively of proteins (no DNA or RNA), which he christened Prion. He was vilified in public and private by other scientists, but persevered and eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1997. Another case is the one of the Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman who discovered a new type of crystal that did not conform to common rules that crystals followed according to the field of crystallography. When he published his findings about these “quasicrystals”, the negative reaction to his discovery was so strong that the leader of his research group asked him to leave the team for bringing disgrace to it. Shechtman was ridiculed and lectured about the basics of crystallography by other scientists, and the famous two-time Nobel Prize winning scientist Linus Pauling famously stated that “there are no quasi-crystals, but quasi-scientists”. Shechtman eventually prevailed and was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2011. Finally, there was the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener, who proposed in the early twentieth century that the position of continents is not fixed, but rather that they move slowly over geological periods of time (continental drift). He was called “delirious” and a “stranger to the facts”. His theory was labelled “pseudoscience” and a “fairy tale”. New students in geology were advised by their mentors that acceptance of continental drift would hurt their careers. Through it all, Wegener kept refining his theory and answering his critics. Eventually, after several decades during which new discoveries were made regarding the spreading of the sea floor and new disciplines such as paleomagnetism demonstrated the drift of continents, his ideas were accepted and incorporated into the new theory of plate tectonics. Unfortunately, Wegener did not live to see this. He died during an expedition to Greenland in 1930. Why should scientists be so hypercritical? Isn’t science about proposing hypotheses and testing them through observation and experiment? Why should proposing a hypothesis, no matter how far-fetched, be met with virulent skepticism, humiliation, and insults? This has, of course, nothing to do with the scientific method. The reasons for this must reside in human nature. To my knowledge, the exact explanation has not been pinpointed, but I believe there are two phases to this phenomenon. The first phase is the short-term response of a scientist upon being confronted with an idea that upends his or her world view. During this phase it may be understandable that an individual will engage in a “knee-jerk” reaction and latch on to any imperfections in the idea in order to criticize it and its proponent. The second phase is what happens over a longer time frame of weeks, months, or even years after the idea has been proposed. This phase is the more interesting one because the short-term emotions have quieted down and scientists make calculated decisions as to what to do about the idea. The forces governing this second phase have been equated with the perception of how young and old individuals react to change. It is argued that old scientists are more comfortable with established knowledge, especially if they played a role in generating this knowledge. These older individuals may view any proposal which threatens to upend the conventional wisdom with suspicion and skepticism, to the point of using their influence to block funding to perform research into the new idea, impede the publication of research regarding the idea in mainstream journals, or even hinder the academic careers of the proponents. On the other hand, young scientists who are beginning their careers may be more receptive to new ideas and more welcoming to the individuals who propose them. The physicist Max Planck once famously remarked that; “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This notion that scientific progress ultimately depends on the replacement of a new generation of scientists by another, is often humorously phrased as “science advances one funeral at a time”. While there may be some truth to this, I believe this generational replacement notion is not the whole story, and may in fact just reflect the difficulty in carrying out confirmatory experiments or observations. The thing at the heart of scientific progress is the ability to replicate experimental results or observations, or test an idea. If replicating a controversial experiment or observation, or testing an idea, is something that can be accomplished by one lab in a short time within current budgets, acceptance of a new idea may occur relatively quickly. This happened in the case of Shechtman, and also, although more slowly, in the case of Prusiner. Other scientists, both young and old, tried to replicate the experiments of Shechtman and Prusiner and indeed obtained the same results. On the other hand, if replicating experimental results or observations, or testing an idea, requires expensive studies that take many years and involve coordination between several laboratories and travelling around the globe, or the development of new experimental tools or even new scientific disciplines, the process may be much slower, especially after you factor in the resolution of any technical problems that may arise. This happened in Wegener’s case During these longer time frames, you may have a significant dying out of old scientists and their replacement with a younger generation. If the new ideas are finally accepted, the long time frame that it took for this to happen may give rise to the notion that the idea was accepted only because the old scientists died, which may not the case. Be that as it may, the scientific establishment clearly sets a very high bar for new ideas to be accepted. Proposing an idea that runs contrary to the established order is not for the faint of heart. But it may just happen that if you can put up with the insults, in the end you may persevere after enough funerals! Photograph of Dan Shechtman by Holger Motzkau used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. The Wegener photo from the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg and the Max Planck photo by Transocean (Photographic company, Berlin) are in the public domain. |
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