And That's Science!

        At first glance, the ultimate goal of science is to make ground-breaking discoveries that change how we view different aspects of the world. But in reality, the scientific process isn’t pretty. Sure, different phenomena, like a rainbow, could be described as beautiful, but the time and effort dedicated to understanding how one actually exists is extensive. Understanding the basic building blocks of chemistry would provide information about the makeup of a water molecule, but as Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen point out in “Science is Getting Less Bang for its Buck”, “It’s one thing to have equations describing the way a single molecule… behaves. It’s quite another to understand why rainbows form in the sky…”. So what am I getting at? Simply put: Science is harder than it ever has been. The more information that we gather, the more difficult science becomes, and in the 21st century, advancements in different fields of science, like physics and chemistry, are appearing slim. Trust in the scientific process is bleak in recent times, however, what hides behind the “Breaking News!” headlines of another NASA project are hundreds of thousands of failed experiments and calculations. And that’s science!

As a scientific community, we must begin to normalize retracting false positive evidence instead of being hellbent on proving a hypothesis. In her article, “Science Isn’t Broken,” Christie Aschwanden proceeds, “When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does.(And if that doesn’t work, you can always fall back on HARKing — hypothesizing after the results are known.)”. It’s human nature to be biased, and when a lot of time and effort has been allotted to a project, scientists tend to have tunnel vision. It’s okay that the rate of Nobel Peace Prize discoveries have hit a lull, because over five hundred prizes have been awarded in the last eleven decades. Now in the modern era, years of schooling are required to understand the discoveries that have already been made, the cost of research is at an all time high, and the size of research teams can range into the thousands. Doubling back on experiments that an entire team of scientists have put hard man hours into, and taking a new course, is not an easy thing to do, but failure in the scientific community needs to start being more widely accepted. 


Unlike mathematics, where mistakes don’t lead to the answer, failed experiments and research can help scientists focus on more promising routes of study. After many golden ages of science over the duration of the 1900s, more often than not, data will lead to a dead end. I mean, think about it: In the 1930s, someone invented the electron microscope, and for almost one hundred years, the understanding of our world at a molecular level has increased tenfold. So first, someone had to figure out how to invent the strongest microscope in the world because scientists needed to see smaller things, and then for a century, data has been collected using the instrument. Inventions and discoveries like such that have opened the door to the scientific breakthroughs that we learn about in classrooms today have certainly provided us with more information than ever before, but that means there is much more to learn in turn.


So again, what am I getting at? I’m not saying that we should stop using microscopes, I’m actually saying the exact opposite. Even though the road will only get tougher as humans pursue their quest for knowledge, scientists and followers of the scientific community must begin to roll with the punches. Unlike old science, new science comes with more time, money, and effort, and a new mentality has to come along with it. If a hypothesis is being retested to exhaustion, maybe it’s time to move on. And if the headlines aren’t flashing “New Element Discovered!” but are instead mending past false positive data, it should be seen as an attempt to strengthen the reliability of science, not to lose faith. It’s messy, it’s not perfect, and it’s tougher than ever, but that’s science.

                                                                                                                                - Nicholas Forcellati

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