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Essay:Science and politics (view source)
Revision as of 11:43, March 30, 2009
, 11:43, March 30, 2009end of sermon - be sincere and humble!
But many of us don't want to get the right answer, or we know it already but want to conceal it from others. A major accounting firm was drived out of business recently when it was discovered that it had colluded with a large corporation to conceal financial irregularities. It had certified that everything was okay, when it knew that it wasn't. It got caught lying.
But many of us don't want to get the right answer, or we know it already but want to conceal it from others. A major accounting firm was drived out of business recently when it was discovered that it had colluded with a large corporation to conceal financial irregularities. It had certified that everything was okay, when it knew that it wasn't. It got caught lying.
What does science do about this? The fundamental principle of science is that a theory is discarded is always considered disproved when the predictions it makes are contradicted by observations. When a [[hypothesis]] says one thing, and the data say another, we keep the data and throw out the hypothesis. "Back to the drawing board" is the motto.
Scientists who really want to know the truth about anything will always submit their findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. "Please find a flaw in my work, if there is one," they say. Because scientists are all aware that wishful thinking can lead to errors, they hope that other scientists will review their calculations ore even run the same experiments. If five different independent groups of scientists run the same experiment and get the same results, that's a real confidence booster. But if even '''one''' experiment gets the "wrong" results, a sincere scientist sits up and takes notice.
Einstein is credited with saying that he didn't worry if 400 other scientists refused to accept his new theory of physics, because it only takes one scientist to prove him wrong.
We all need to have the same humility.