Certainty No
The New York Times has an article by Edward Rothstein on the annual Edge question, which John Brockman poses to a large number of writers, scientists and thinkers (many of them all three at once). This year the question is ‘What’s your law?’
There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy. Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy.
Very good. But Rothstein says an odd thing in his piece.
But curiously, an aura of modesty, tentativeness and skepticism hovers over the submissions — this from a group not renowned for self-abnegation. This may, perhaps, be an admission that fundamental insights are not now to be had. But it may also be an uncertainty about science itself.
But it’s not curious at all. Far from it. Is the reporter not aware that that’s how science is done? Doesn’t he realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of science, one of its definitions, is that it’s always revisable? Offering a tentative ‘law’ implies the opposite of ‘an uncertainty about science itself’; it conveys the kind of confidence one can have in a form of inquiry that is on principle committed to changing its laws when new evidence turns up.
Amusingly enough, I linked to another article in which Colin Blakemore said exactly that only yesterday.
Science must be given back to ordinary people and the key to that is education. I say that with some trepidation, given the political incorrectness of the phrase ‘public understanding of science’ and the new mantra of dialogue and debate. It doesn’t really matter whether people know that the Earth goes round the Sun. But it does matter if they don’t know what a control experiment is, if they think that science produces absolute certainties, if they see differences of opinion among scientists as an indication that the scientific process is flawed, or if they feel robbed of the right to make ethical judgments.
It does matter if people think that science produces absolute certainties. Apparently the place to start is with journalists.
Given the amount that I have learned from some of the responses to the Edge question, I found the two paragraphs beginning “Strangely, the contributions from which one learns the most…” tragic. The two examples quoted could be described as witty or glib, depending on the reader’s perspective, but surely not educational? And if he was looking for wry observations to quote couldn’t he have picked the rather more provokative ones by John McWhorter, Irene Pepperberg or Richard Dawkins? Or is that sort of talk deemed inappropriate for the Arts pages?
On a slight tangent (definitely still in keeping with the theme of B & W) one of the Edge responses reminded me of something that I would love to have cleared up if anyone would be so good:
Venter’s Second Law was a kind of “Moore’s Law for biotechnology”. But isn’t Moore’s Law, or at least its description as a Law, very silly? Isn’t it like the proposition “the Florida Marlins will win the world series every six years”? Isn’t it like a hunch yet to be disproven, a weather forecast, or even a prediction of the number of species to go extinct over the next fifty years as a result of global warming? I have always thought that it was self-evidently silly as a scientific hypothesis, but I’ve never heard anyone else say so, and a disturbing number of intelligent people seem to say “Moore’s Law” without any sort of physical betrayal of insincerity. What am I missing?
“Moore’s Law” should more properly be called “Moore’s Prediction” or even “Moore’s Observation”. Generally people who use it understand it is not a law as such. However is has very accurately predicted the change in chip geometries over the years. The “law” also contains a caveat. Even when postulated, it was made clear it would only apply until the early part of the 21st Century.
Tragic indeed. The NY Times is woefully inadequate in its coverage of such things. The Book Review is notoriously weak, for example. The Times is supposed to be (at least according to the Times) the ‘newspaper of record’ – which is really pretty sad.
Thanks for that Chris.
In half-hearted defence of the Times, the vast majority of science-related reporting I have ever read in newspapers has seemed weak to me. I’d love someone to tell me I just read the wrong papers, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m not sure whether this is because science reporting is in some way genuinely worse than other reporting, or because of an effect that Michael Crichton talked about in a speech published on his web-site:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Maybe a bit of both?
Well, at least the Guardian, for one, has articles by actual working scientists. Quite often. Far more often than the Times does, I’m pretty sure.
The Guardian does have such articles in its science supplement. It also carries some spectacularly silly statements in its science stories on the news pages. I liked the one recently about some recently discovered species of frog, which informed us that “its ancestors were hopping around in the days of the dinosaurs”. Wow! Mine too! We must have such a lot to talk about…
Yes, true, and our friend Philip Stott keeps a sharp eye on the silly bits.
Hey, my ancestors were a tiny shrew-like mammal. You don’t mean to tell me you’re from the same family?! Let’s have a reunion!
I don’t know if this is still true, but I was told by someone in the mid 1990’s that newspaper print journalists were typically advised to write for someone with a high school education. I’m not suggesting anything, but feel free to deconstruct my meaning. And empathize.
I think it probably is still true – of US print journalists that is. (And that’s at the high end.) I’ve heard a lot of stories of that kind. And it’s been going on for a long time, too – Dwight Macdonald wrote an article in the 50s which mentioned that when he wrote for ‘Time’ in the 30s he was required to identify every reference no matter how obvious. ‘Queen Victoria (19th Century British monarch),’ that sort of thing.