The Birth And Death Of Scientific Ideas
‘Truth’, the scientific method and how theories are brought to life and laid to rest.
This article is for those that are interested in an informal explanation of the nature of ‘truth’ in science, how science is practically applied, and what factors impact the advancement of scientific theories. You can skip to the summary at the end if you’d like the highlights…
You Can Handle The ‘Truth’
Those who identify themselves as a part of the ‘scientific culture’, well intended as they are, a lot of the time find themselves falling trap to the fallacy that science is a sacred endeavor unearthing the objective truths of existence.
They feel that the prevailing scientific theories of any time in history are the ‘truth’ and that anyone who questions or denies them is too blind to see.
Anyone that has truly adopted the scientific mindset understands that there is no objectively ‘true’ idea and that there are only ideas that are better explanations of a phenomenon than the rest, with better experimental evidence to support it, at any one point in time. An idea is only ‘true’ in so far as no one can currently provide an opposing idea with better justifications.
It requires a good dose of humility and comfort with uncertainty to truly adopt this mindset and accept that we don’t actually know anything for certain, to be content in the fact that what is ‘real’ is in constant flux and to gladly drop your truth for a better one.
This raises two questions:
1. How do ideas that were once ‘true’ fall to the waste side and essentially ‘die’?
2. How do new ideas become accepted ‘truths’?
The Scientific Method
Just to be sure that everyone is up to scratch before we aim to answer these two questions, we need to go through the basic steps of the scientific method.
Step 1: Jill is curious about something she is observing.
Step 2: Jill formulates a hypothesis; she proposes an explanation of why, what she observed, is the way it is.
Step 3: Jill creates a test, based on the hypothesis, that aims to determine whether or not her hypothesis is a useful tool for explaining and predicting the said observation. If Jill’s hypothesis is proved ‘useful’, then it is accepted as a scientific theory.
Step 4: Jill’s theory could be replaced by Bob’s theory because he provides a better rationalization of the observation with better testing methods. This is not to say that Jill was wrong, it’s just that Bob improves on Jill’s theory or comes from a totally different angle to what Jill did.
It would be wonderful if it was that linear and straight-forward, that new ideas were adopted purely on merit or that the worse ideas gracefully moved on. But that’s not always the case…
How it really happens
For starters, any conversation on how ideas die can’t be held without mentioning the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Max Planck. Max Planck won his Nobel Prize in Physics as a result of his crucial role in coming up with the initial building blocks for a completely new view of physics, that today we know as quantum theory. For all his astounding scientific achievements, he wasn’t particularly optimistic about the scientific community’s ability to change…
“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.” — Max Planck
New Kids On The Block
This is the view of the death and birth of ideas that says science advances forward as a result of a steady flow of new practitioners flowing through the ranks, providing new insights and building on, or breaking down, what came before them.
An example is that of Copernicus’s Heliocentric Model triumphing over the Ptolemaic system, placing Earth at the center of the universe, that had reigned for centuries. The switch initially didn’t garner any support until well into the 1700s, after being published in 1543. This was because of a number of fixer-uppers that the theory was lacking. However, two major solutions to these faults were provided by Johannes Kepler, introducing his elliptical orbits, and Galileo’s principles of motion. The new kids on the block, at the time, provided the pushes that the theory needed to iron out its faults and launch it into ‘common knowledge’.
Sometimes the mere idea underpinning the new theory gained traction quickly just because its fundamental argument was better than anything else prior. Newton first advanced a new theory of light with a short article that barely included any experimental evidence for his opinion. This initial spark piqued peoples’ interest, and when 30 years later Newton provided the full argument and experimental evidence required, his new theory of light became the norm within a couple of years.
Goliath And His Shadow
Imagine David deciding on what research topic he is going to choose to pursue and he sees Goliath standing there with his 100 peer-reviewed publications, book deals and iconoclast status as the field’s foremost thought leader, how often do you think David is going to pick that field?
One such study, engaged by a number of authors, that sought to test this hypothesis, focused on exploring “how established stars influence the flow of ideas by examining what happens to scientific fields when a dominating figure unexpectedly dies”.
The study found 452 life scientists who had died prior to entering pre-retirement, or taking on more administrative duties at the latter end of their careers, and looked into how their deaths had affected the publication rates and funding of their fields. The results of their study painted a detailed picture that resonates with Max Planck’s ‘science advances by funerals’ sentiment:
- Those that collaborated with Goliath published less.
- Publication numbers of those that had never collaborated with Goliath, and never stepped on their turf, skyrocketed after his death. They also cited previous research less and cited the late Goliath’s work even less.
- It was found that while Goliath was alive, he inadvertently determined the focus of his field and where it would advance. This was done so by skewing the field members’ norms towards his own and creating an in-group among those that ‘agree’ with his views.
New Measurements
The perspective that new ideas are born as a result of new information, which is gathered from new measurements, sees a reciprocal relationship between technology and the scientific method.
The prime example of this is Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix model of the structure of DNA. Prior to this discovery, a number of scientists had contributed to research on the DNA molecule starting in the late 1860s. Watson and Crick put the nail in the coffin when they unearthed the three-dimensional double helix nature of the DNA molecule in 1953.
What leads to this fantastic discovery of theirs was a new means of measurement, namely the analysis of the chemical composition of DNA and X-ray crystallographic evidence. Don’t ask me what that means, but that’s what happened. New means of measurement, provided new data, which resulted in a new idea.
There was no established theory of the structure of the DNA molecule for it to try and fend off and topple, the theory stepped into an area in our collective knowledge that was void of a theory.
New ‘Fragestelleng’
The age-old mantra ‘perspective is everything’ has stood the test of time for a reason. New developments have always been onset by a creative, ‘out-the-box’ thought practically applied. In scientific circles, this is known as ‘Fragestellung’, which directly translates to ‘the posing of a question’ or ‘a world view from which a question arises’.
Scientific fields that have population biology as a central tenant initially started, and where largely perpetuated, as a result of measurements requiring no equipment.
The interesting observation is that only up until the 1700’s did any progress or findings occur in these fields. Previous great thinkers and intellectual cultures could have easily conducted the counting, observations, and measurements required to unearth new data, and therefore wholly new ideas. What stopped them from conducting investigations into population biology was the unique ‘Fragestellung’ of their time, it left a blind spot in their world view that didn’t allow such measurements to come into focus.
This ‘Fragestellung’ could be seen as the creative spark needed by any scientist wishing to unearth groundbreaking insights:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” (Einstein — On Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms, 1931, p. 49).
In Summary
There may not be any such thing as ‘objective truths’, but the method that we come to define ‘scientific truths’ is still the best way we have for justifying why we think the world is the way we perceive it to be.
Max Planck, as pessimistic as his comments were, was right to an extent in that science advances through funerals. However, he wasn’t correct in saying it’s the only way that science advances.
Sure, when senior practitioners leave a field new scientific advances are given space to flourish, but the same could be said for new researchers stepping in and adding fresh findings to long-established ideas.
With the advancement of technology, new ways of measurement allow us to unearth new information that fills the virgin voids of human knowledge.
A new perspective can drive scientific advancement just as easily as the death of a Goliath practitioner. When we no longer saw ourselves as the center of the universe, new possibilities for discovery availed themselves to us, giving us a new lens with which to look onto the earth.
These are the factors contributing to our constant pursuit for the closest truth, our never-ending quest for knowledge and understanding. If you can take one lesson from this, it’s that you must never stop trying to prove yourself wrong…
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Daniel
