Scientific (R)evolutions and what they are not – 11/11/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

I have noticed a healthy trend in the public that follows scientific topics in reports, podcasts and videos (I’m sorry, but I refuse to use the expression “consume content”, a horrible thing). People are asking more and more frequently how to avoid buying a pig in a poke. In other words, how to identify reliable sources of information; how to distinguish real scientific advances from well-groomed and smelly pseudoscience.

The short answer is “there is no such thing as a ready-made formula”. For the lay public — and for science journalists like me —, learning to separate the wheat from the chaff takes time and a certain ingenuity and art. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some useful shortcuts for developing what I affectionately call a “poop detector” (metaphorical, of course).

I would like to take advantage of this column to address one of these shortcuts. It is very common for crooks to take advantage of one of the worthy characteristics of science — its provisionality, which means that theories continue to be tested, revised and, sometimes discarded — to cast doubt on absolutely everything.

“Wow, but do you happen to believe in immutable truths? Scientific thinking demands that we always question and question everything”, say these wolves dressed as sheep. “Outside the box” ideas, according to these people, deserve to be heard because what sounds absurd today may end up revealing an important insight that, due to inertia or envy, complacent scientists end up disregarding. Really?

Allow me to quote the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996): “People laughed at Columbus. People laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo.” A different idea is not synonymous with a respectable idea. And there’s more: notice that Sagan is citing figures (like Columbus and the Wright brothers, and, of course, our Santos Dumont) who, due to historical circumstances, were capable of carrying out large-scale upheavals in certain areas of knowledge.

Before Columbus, no one in the Old World seriously considered the existence of another continent on this side of the Atlantic (even though Columbus swore up and down that he had reached Asia…). No one had flown heavier-than-air aircraft before the Wrights.

But the construction of scientific knowledge, when done well, is an essentially cumulative process. Which means that the solid findings of older experiments and theories limit how much new discoveries are capable of altering our scientifically informed conception of the world. Thus, in many aspects, even the greatest revisions of knowledge involve details, margins of error, and do not overturn what was previously known.

A frequently cited example of a scientific revolution that helps illustrate this is the formulation of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics at the beginning of the last century. In conceptual terms, it is true that they completely change what we thought we knew based on the Newtonian physics that had been refined since the 17th century.

But for a wide variety of contexts — including the task of sending astronauts to the Moon — Newton’s multi-centenary physics solves all our problems. We appeal to relativity to build GPS devices and to quantum mechanics to understand the counterintuitive behavior of elementary particles, but neither contradicts the “ancient” physics of our everyday lives.

In fact, there is another branch of research to which we can apply this same logic. The understanding that gases such as carbon dioxide are capable of warming the atmosphere is based on ancient and very reliable physics, resolved in the 19th century.

We still need to understand countless details about the climate system. But the fact that clogging the atmosphere with carbon dioxide is a recipe for potentially unbearable heat is as difficult to question as the acceleration that happens when you throw a marble from the tenth floor. Be wary of any know-it-all who says anything other than that.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.