Ignorance is bliss

What do scientists do all day? If you had monitored my behaviour during my days as a PhD student you would have been forgiven for thinking that scientists spend an inordinate amount of time hiding from their supervisors in toilets and stalking old school acquaintances on Facebook.   However, I suspect any good working scientist spends their day being happily ignorant (and in a lab instead of Borders).  In science, ignorance is your most valuable currency.  Without ignorance you have no questions, which means no hypotheses. This means no testing your hypotheses, which means no research papers, no funding, no recognition and no parents who claim to be proud of you despite their long-held belief that you are socially inept.  Ignorance is everything.   Scientists do not dabble in certainty. Some things (like ideas, numerical constants, observations) can certainly seem certain when there is overwhelming evidence to suggest they hold up against scrutiny and testing over and over again, but they are only as certain as their continued resilience to testing and scrutiny. If an idea has a weakness then somewhere along the line an experiment or mathematical formula or stoned student might show that either the idea is false, or that it is only as we previously assumed or predicted it would be in certain circumstances. 

There are some ideas that seem so certain we often believe without question that we live in a universe of absolute certainty. Science and mathematics have given us insights into universal constants that, if changed, would alter the very foundations of reality.  Science is good for that.  Along with mathematics, science is one of the most penetrating tools we may ever have for understanding the ‘true’ nature of our reality, as we are capable of understanding it. But science is not good at saying that these constants are certain, definite*, absolute or unchangeable.  It tells us that when we test these constants against different scenarios and parameters they remain unchanged. They are constants, but they might not be certainties.  However, the more science gets done the more these constants, or ideas or theories become unified into a framework of understanding that all fits together. The more certain they seem.  But while science allows us to define parameters and boundaries for reality to an amazing degree it also allows us to accept that these parameters may change, even at infinitesimal odds.  Improbable? Yes. Impossible? No.

However, whether because of how we teach science in schools, or how the media portrays it, or how adept we are at taking abstract concepts and turning them into a useable framework of understanding, we constantly seem to assume that some things are ‘certain’ and ‘correct’ without question. We also make assumptions about scientists: Scientists are purveyors of certainty. They are amassers of the right knowledge, not whatever fallacious shit we dim folk might come up with.  They are gods of understanding. They are boffins and they seldom remove their facial hair whether male or female.  They know something we don’t! This means that scientists, who actually rather enjoy being ignorant and remain ever cautious that their knowledge may not be right, or certain or unchangeable, are heralded by the media and some other people as bastions of The Truth.

This is bullshit.  We may seek to know but it is in the ‘seeking’ that science lies, not the ‘knowing’. One thing we do know is that absolute truth is a bloody hard thing to come by.   However, we do amass knowledge through our endeavors and that knowledge is wonderfully put to good use for the benefit of everyone a lot of the time. It also allows us to see just how beautiful, strange and COOL reality is. Science has to have a place in society for these reasons.  It has to be used in our policies, our classrooms, our hospitals and our courts of law because of what it allows us to know with better (but not absolute!) certainty than faith or guesswork or assumption alone. 

So what expectations should Society have of science and scientists?

I intend to explore this more thoroughly in a series of posts on ‘science and society’ (ooh err!) over the next few months.  I will vent my views on how scientists are currently being treated in light of devastating earthquakes, climate scandals and media hypes.  Hopefully I will be able to demonstrate that science can be used to great ends but only if we know what we can expect from the people doing the science.  Hopefully, they will be interesting posts!   In closing this introduction I will just say this: Science deals in building an understanding of reality through ignorance, questions, ideas, tests, scrutiny, more questions and collectively deciding where the current state of knowledge lies.  We look to where it may lead in future based on a massive, collaborative framework of knowledge and previous experience.  We are standing on the shoulders of others but we are looking ahead in the spirit of ignorance.  There is little room for certainty. This is one journey with no road map.

*Occasionally, we have to descend into demanding that our ideas ARE CERTAIN FACTS.  Creationists make us do this by failing to understand that the words ‘evolutionary theory’ mean ‘a synthesis of understanding as a result of years and years of observation and experimentation, which we are still putting to the test’, rather than, ‘some crazy shit a beardy guy and Alfred Russell Wallace came up with, which you heathens all adhere to like it’s fly paper!’ Our response is to cry disdainfully that evolution is Fact not Just A Hunch.  As scientists we know there are few things about which we can have absolute certainty. Evolution is perhaps not one of them but it is a damn sight better than believing that ‘god’ cobbled everything together by intelligent design, while rendering us vulnerable to death by chocking on a LEGO brick.  It’s better because we have tested the theory and have found lots of our assumptions to hold true in lots of different tests.  We do not believe Charles Darwin had a good point because we admire his facial hair, impressive as it was.  By ‘fact’ we mean ‘we have evidence’. Good old evidence.