A Brief Word For Science

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mso489

Lifer
Feb 21, 2013
41,210
60,433
Science is science, an mode of thought, experiment, and unending review and reconsideration, that has raised the species from hunting and gathering to genetics and the cosmos. The answers science provides may serve people, but people can never order up the answers that they choose. Usually, what people choose to believe about unanswered questions, however well intended, is exploded by research. Often scientists learn the most by figuring out how and why they are wrong. Science advances by thousands of studies many of which seem useless or frivolous until they are put together with the vast array of others to reveal an unsuspected truth. That's when it delivers inventions, insight, cures, and benefits, while punishing premature presumptions about what we know to date. It is a beautiful tool. Having spent more than thirty years working with biomedical researchers, not as one of them, but as a writer and editor on the subject, I celebrate the steadfastness and discipline with which they work, and lament the lack of education in science that would make appreciation and understanding of it more general. We abandon science at our peril, as it is often our only help.
 

mso489

Lifer
Feb 21, 2013
41,210
60,433
Two examples: The Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock was almost the town fool at genetics meetings for decades, the little old lady in tennis shoes who showed up with research no one could believe or even understand. Until one year the whole multimillion dollar establishment caught up to her, to their vast embarrassment and confusion, whereupon she pulled out a stack of other unpublished work that proved -- agonizingly to her colleagues -- equally correct. When they asked her what she would do with the big prize money, she paused and then said, perhaps she would buy a new pair of tennis shoes for starters.

Another Nobel Laureate, Martin Rodbell, figured out fairly early in his career, how chemical signals moved between tissues and cells within the body, and was regarded for most of his career as a oddball because what he'd discovered didn't match the current thinking. Again, oops. Fortunately, the correctness of his findings occurred to the establishment just a few years before his death, whereupon he observed that the prize money was about as much as a champion tennis pro earned in an afternoon. Then, in an endearing mistake, mentioned something about how Leonardi di Vinci had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, when of course that was Michael Angelo. I happened to know him slightly, and he was the same guy before an after.

The examples are vast and in every field. That is the excitement of it. Before we all blow ourselves to hell for misguided emotions. We are and could be a magnificent species.
 
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kcghost

Lifer
May 6, 2011
13,158
21,428
77
Olathe, Kansas
Roger Penrose had to wait over 55 years before receiving his Nobel Prize in Physics. The Nobel Committee is notorious for wanting to see proof of something before awarding the guy who came up with a theory. And they don't award dead people squat. Peter Higgs had to wait just as long for his Nobel. Of course, Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler had less than a year's wait researchers found proof for there theory right way.
 

warren

Lifer
Sep 13, 2013
11,699
16,207
Foothills of the Chugach Range, AK
It's not "science" with the problem it's the conflicting, changing facts/theories which confuse people. Most people seem to think scientists are infallible, especially when many blithely publicize theories and such, unreviewed and unproven as studied fact. Most of the problems stem from scientists who are not ethical or are, perhaps incompetent, having political or personal agendas. Scientists are often science's worst promoters. People get confused when one answer is correct on Monday and by Friday coffee/wine/masks/what have you are suddenly no longer acceptable/dangerous/efficacious/etc.

People have a problem with "flexible" science. They are much happier with constants. Scientists can only make findings based on "knowns" and those are ever changing as knowledge widens and improves, techniques evolve and equipment progresses. Then throw in incompetent scientists or, those with agendas and it is perfectly understandable why many people distrust scientists, scientific findings, etc.
 

timt

Lifer
Jul 19, 2018
2,844
22,729
No offense MSO, but I still cannot believe that we have to promote the value of Science in the United States of America in 2020.
Ok, I’ll bite. What science isn’t being promoted adequately in the USA in 2020?
 
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mso489

Lifer
Feb 21, 2013
41,210
60,433
Yup. Some scientists are remarkable in their work, but throw them into some other controversy, and it is like headfirst into a tree shredder. True of most of us. And people hate authority, even when it has a basis, and not always when it doesn't. I think if general education gave a better grounding in science, the method, the difference between speculation and peer-reviewed research, it would somewhat help. Too many studies I was asked to write up pointed up their relation to cancer therapy or "cures," when it had not arrived there yet, nor anywhere near. Non-habit-forming pain medications are too often claimed as an endpoint, and we can all see the efficacy (or lack) of that. But there is pressure for claims, to attain funding. Scientists are people, and therein lies the problem. If Labrador Retrievers could do science, we'd be better off.
 

peregrinus

Lifer
Aug 4, 2019
1,205
3,787
Pacific Northwest
What is this science that you speak of?
Obviously in jest, but still...
Funny Science Definition Poster
 

Magpiety

Part of the Furniture Now
Dec 7, 2019
537
1,773
Kansas City
Cheers! My wife is molecular biotechnologist, she works as a breast cancer scientist. She could easily do my job, but I couldn't dream of doing hers.

I really admire her, it's incredible to watch her body of research grow every day.
 
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Seamaster

Starting to Get Obsessed
Sep 16, 2020
191
948
Scotland
There are good actors and bad actors in science as there are in every other trade. Most are salaried, and will say and do what is required to draw that salary, same as the rest of us. Remember, some gave us a moon landing, others gave us Thalidomide.
 

rajangan

Part of the Furniture Now
Feb 14, 2018
974
2,809
Edmonton, AB
Psychology suffers from physics envy—the ability to 'prove' their answers mathematically. In psychology there is much science, to a limit. Much can be explained physiologically, or in regards to environment and behaviour, tested by scientific method and categorized and quantifed statistically, but 'physics envy' rears its head when a line is drawn between what is testable and what is not.

A simple thing as 'blue' stands as a wall to scientific research when one attempts to go beyond wavelengths, rods, cones, and neural pathways into the realm of the subjective. You look at blue and call it thus. I look at the same thing and agree with you. But are you seeing what I'm seeing? This is, as far as we know, unknowable.

Psychology is afraid to look the fool by pushing towards understanding the ontological experience of subjectivity. Meanwhile, despite being incompatible, the physicists use both quantum field theory and general relativity to reach into the beginning of time and almost touch the ineffable. This is the part of physics the psychologist should be envious of.
 
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