This Earth Day – as we acknowledge our abject dependence on a healthy Earth to stay alive and celebrate the intricate and fragile interplay of chemistry and energy that sustains us – let’s also celebrate the means by which we understand how and why these things work.
Let’s celebrate science.
Maybe not everyone agrees: A recent University of New Hampshire poll found that 43 percent of Granite Staters think scientists falsify their findings to fit a preconceived personal agenda.
That can happen when “corporate science” phonies up a study to support a marketing campaign, such as tobacco companies tormenting numbers to “prove” that smoking isn’t addictive or oil companies selecting facts to claim that the Earth isn’t warming.
But real science, done by professionals for the sake of knowledge and not a business’s bottom line, works in a way that makes it virtually impossible for falsified claims to survive.
I’ve been a science journalist for almost 40 years. I’ve talked in depth with Nobel Prize winners and workaday bench chemists. I’ve hung out with them in coffee houses, eaten dinner with their families and listened to them muse about their work.
This doesn’t mean that I know a lot about science. But I do know something about scientists.
First, scientists are entirely human. They can be petty or generous, vain or humble, atheists or devout. Politically, some are right-wing authoritarians; others are bleeding hearts.
Second, despite their individualities, professional scientists revere factual accuracy. It’s the currency of their profession. Their careers depend on it.
The reason: Scientific knowledge grows in a carefully cultivated garden tended by many competing gardeners.
First, a scientist with an idea tests it through experiments and then tries to figure out whether the data from the tests validate the idea.
The scientist then writes up the idea, the experiment, and his or her interpretation of the data and sends the paper to a scientific journal. The journal’s editors then send the paper to other experts in the same field and these experts weed out papers with obvious flaws, such as poorly designed experiments, faulty reasoning or contorted conclusions.
After the paper is published, the original idea still isn’t validated until other scientists have run the same experiment and come to the same conclusions. Maybe others can’t reproduce the experiment’s results or they see an alternative explanation for the outcomes. These results also are published in journals for yet more scientists to pore over.
That gives scientists an unshakable motive to stick to the straight and narrow. They make their mark by using verified data to plant a new idea or knock down an existing one.
Accuracy is to a scientist what a giant stack of chips is to a poker player at the end of the night – not just bragging rights and an ego boost, but also a proof of skill and justification for being and advancing in the profession.
On the other hand, any scientist trying to twist data to fit a preconceived conclusion is quickly unmasked through this review process and is likely to find himself suddenly teaching remedial fractions or selling paint at Walmart.
So let’s celebrate this about science: Despite what politicians or commentators (most of whom aren’t scientists) declare about scientific propositions such as global warming, no idea in science survives for long that hasn’t been thoroughly validated by those who know.
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “One of the nice things about science is that it’s true – even if you don’t believe it.”
(Bennett Daviss lives in Walpole.)