A year ago today, I wrote a whimsical piece about science and science fiction called The Surprising Physics of the Star Wars Force. The next day I made some quick edits and published it as the first post of Quantemplation. Over the twelve months since, Quantemplation has grown into a project far beyond what I expected. From that initial fifteen hundred word stream of consciousness, it has blossomed into over forty thousand words of carefully crafted and researched essays. Many of these essays took far more time and painstaking work than I had anticipated, but it has been worth it as I am immensely proud of what I have produced. However, as my schedule and lifestyle have shifted across the past year, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain the level of commitment and intensity required to continue. For this reason, I intend for this to be the final post of Quantemplation.
The way I have written Quantemplation is a reflection of my perspective on what science is and how we should all engage with it in our lives. In wrapping up, it seems fitting to step back and explore this view. I hope that this will inspire you to keep engaging with science and to make scientific thinking a part of your life.
What Makes Science Special?
At its core, science is not so different from any other area of thought and study. Scientists examine the evidence they see and experience in the world and use their intellect and knowledge to integrate this evidence into theories of reality that make sense to them. They communicate these theories to their colleagues and then participate in an ongoing discourse by which the community collectively discusses and evaluates the merits and limitations of the ideas. This is no different from what is done by academics from other disciplines such as history or philosophy. Indeed, it is also fundamentally similar to what each of us does throughout our own lives. If you listen to an everyday conversation at the supermarket or around the dinner table, you will hear the same process being applied to matters of everyday life. Whenever we notice a friend acting strangely or a change in the price of bread, we naturally develop theories about what might explain this, and then discuss our ideas with the people in our lives. To this extent, we are all born scientists.
However, what sets science apart is that has a universally accepted method for putting theories to the test — the scientific experiment. Argumentation is vital to science; it is how we hone the plethora of conceivable speculations on a topic into a solid theory that is worth investing time and money in investigating. But at some point, the arguments must stop and the testing must begin. A scientist who believes a colleague’s theory to be flawed has a recourse unavailable to a politician or philosopher; they can conduct an experiment that shows the theory to be false. This ability to provide the ultimate resolution to what could otherwise be endless debate is what accounts for science’s greatest asset — that it is progressive. Each generation’s science is an unambiguous improvement on its predecessor’s because misconceptions are weeded out while genuine insights which survive the test of experimentation are allowed to continue growing.
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This means that the success of science comes not from how it builds but from how it destroys. Scientific theories are no less the product of human cognition and interpretation than political ideologies or workplace gossip. Their unique power to explain reality comes from the fact that, while a bad political idea or personal grudge may linger indefinitely, a bad scientific idea will eventually be exposed and expunged by experimentation. Given enough time, only the very best scientific ideas survive.
Why Science Needs Patience
This means that scientific understanding depends on patience. When a scientific idea is first reported, it has not yet been put to the test of time. We can and should assess it on its inherent plausibility and explanatory power, just as we might with a political argument. But we should not treat it with the reverence we show to established scientific theories because it has not yet had a chance to fail.
This does not fundamentally change even if the reported theory is backed by the results of a scientific experiment. Given the effectiveness of science, it can be tempting to treat a claim that is backed by a scientific study as “scientifically proven”. But this can be misleading. Indeed, a basic way to test the results of a study is to repeat the study and see if you get the same results. Yet when a team of scientists repeated one hundred psychology experiments published in prestigious journals in 2008, they found that more than half did not yield results supporting the conclusions of the original. A similar investigation into influential research papers in the area of cancer biology from between 2010 and 2012 found a similar result. Given the understandable public interest in psychology and cancer research, it is likely that many of these studies that reported results that could not be replicated were reported as big news in the media at the time. You may even have read about some of them. Yet we now know that their conclusions could not be trusted.
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This is the danger with consuming science as news. Science that is new is inherently less reliable than science that has withstood the test of time. In 2011, researchers at CERN reported an observation of particles travelling faster than the speed of light, in violation of Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The response of professional physicists to this news was that we should wait to see whether the result holds up to further scrutiny before jumping to any conclusions. The following year, this attitude was vindicated by confirmation that the result was an error. Whenever we encounter reports of new scientific results, it behooves us to follow the lead of the professionals and resist the temptation to be immediately swayed by what we read. It is said that “news is a first rough draft of history”; we might similarly say that science news is only a first rough draft of science. Disappointing as it may be, it simply is not possible to learn reliable scientific truths by just following the latest news.
Stories of Science
Of course, this should not discourage us from engaging with science. But rather than seeking thrill in novelty, we can instead find value in using established scientific understanding to tell meaningful stories. All great stories share an ability to captivate us and to not let us go until they have moved us to see our world in a new way. They do this by interweaving a deep truth with our experience and imagination until it becomes an inseparable part of our perception of reality. In science, we find the deepest truths of nature. So, in science, we should also find the greatest stories. Through Quantemplation, I have tried my best to uncover but a few of these tales.
Stories are not only a way to appreciate science; they are also a way to do science. Developing and testing groundbreaking new scientific theories requires equipment, time and expertise available only to professionals. But the same is true of professional art or sport and this does not stop us from painting a picture or playing football in a park for our own enjoyment. So too, we should not be discouraged from engaging in science as a hobby.
Behind everything we see in the world around us, there are scientific stories. All it takes to be an amateur scientist is to try to uncover these stories for yourself. Examine closely what you see until you find something that piques your curiosity. Ask yourself why it is the way it is. Try asking other people in your life for their ideas about it. Try doing research to learn more about the subject of your inquiry and see if it can help guide you towards an understanding. Once you have an idea, craft it into a story and share this story with those around you. As with all scientific theories, they may find flaws in your idea. Practice thinking clearly and being honest in how you respond to such setbacks; be truthful about when a criticism compels you to reject your story and accept a new story. If you adopt these habits, you will find that your understanding of reality will become increasingly filled with better and richer stories for you to enjoy, and to share with the world.
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I deeply appreciate all of the support you have all given me in writing Quantemplation and hope that it has left you feeling inspired to tell your own stories of science. If so, then let its absence only encourage you do this all the more. I hope you will find the same pleasure in sharing your own stories as I have in sharing mine with you. Thank you for joining me on this journey of Quantemplation.
Thank you Paul, it has been a great gift of your time and effort to produce this excellent collection of articles. It has been a pleasure to read and occasionally engage with. Good luck with your ongoing scientific ventures and maybe catch you on an Island one day.