4 important topics about science

4 important topics about science

important topics about science: The important thing is to never stop questioning. Albert einstein. "Trust the science" is the most anti-science statement ever. Questioning science is how you do science! If you cannot question it, it's not science. It's propaganda. What if i told you... Questioning science is science?

So I've seen this sentence being brought up too many times now, both pro and anti-science sides feel entitled to this phrase but honestly, the latter attributes more truth to it. And there is some, sure but it's not nearly enough to cover it.

What I've encountered so far is that the majority of people who say this are to some extent science denials. Let's get the boring part over with first. By definition, science is a collection of knowledge based on testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

This includes everything we know that exists, such as atoms, cells, pandas, and even entire galaxies. Today, most of the science is organized into branches. There is natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics, social sciences such as economics, psychology, and sociology, and then formal sciences like mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science.

Applied sciences are things like engineering and medicine, where scientific knowledge is used for practical purposes. There is debate whether all of the mentioned branches constitute as science in the purest term since parts of the formal sciences don't rely on empirical evidence

important topics about science: meaning evidence that is clear and serves as a base for rational and logical explanations, like the kind of evidence we have for the fact that the earth is round - but there is even debate about what can be considered evidence so... We are not going into that now. I'm being completely honest when I say understanding modern science sucks. Let me elaborate.

As time goes on, science is getting to be more and more of an abstract concept for everyday people one in which they basically have to take everything they hear at face value. Science is inaccessible for multiple reasons and one of those is that if you wish to read scientific text, most times at the very beginning you immediately hit a gigantic paywall.

The other reason was examined here for example. This article is titled "the growing inaccessibility of science" and was published in Nature, a very, very prestigious journal in 1992 written by Donald P. Hayes. The paper examined scientific texts from the 1840s to the 1990s and scored them based on the used text's proximity to language used in everyday articles in international english language newspapers.

These were at the baseline, zero, and a recent article (compared to this paper) in Nature quite far from it at 55.5. Comic books, magazines and children's books were also scored based on the criteria, and farmers talking to dairy cows as well... Ranked at minus 59.1. I have no idea how they got that but it's such a great point of comparison.

At the start, most of the scientific text was the same but with time it got further and further away from common language and closer to professional, making it increasingly hard to understand for average people. For example, Nature,

important topics about science: the very same journal this article was published in at its start was at the same level as these point of comparison newspapers but by the 1940s it got to a level that is impossible to understand without excessive scientific training. As a result, experts who are heavily specialized in a field are able to comprehend these articles to their full extent,

and if they want the general public to understand as well, they need someone to basically translate them and leave out much of the technical details that make them convincing in a scientific way.

Towards the end Hayes states: "The broad consequences are that ideas flow less freely across and within the sciences and the public's access to, and may be trust in science is diminished." Well now we know it's not maybe really.

This article was written 30 years ago. A few years before the infamous MMR scare where the whole "vaccines cause autism" stuff emerged from, which made it incredibly clear just how little the general public is in touch with actual science and how hard it is to tell junk from real. Sometimes even for experts.

important topics about science: For most people science today seems more like an untouchable mystic entity than actual knowledge based on evidence, as the definition would suggest. Due to this growing specialization within fields, even experts of one topic cannot necessarily comment on, and/or understand things outside of their fields of expertise, even though their understanding of their own topic of research is deeper than ever before.

There is a limit to what a person can handle and a deep scientific knowledge comes pretty close to that limit. This is not even mentioning outsiders. If two scientists in different fields cannot understand each other's work, how can we expect people not involved at all to do so?

Considering all of this, I can somewhat empathize with people sceptical of science. Humans are curious by nature and not being able to understand something can be really frustrating. Distrust in science is in no way a new concept and studies show it can depend on a bunch of different factors.

Even though I am somewhat able to empathize with the notion, does it mean it's valid? Nope. We'll have to get quite technical here for a bit.

the scientific method: important topics about science

If you search the scientific method, on the Wikipedia page there is this picture that illustrates the circularity of the whole thing. The scientific method starts off as a question and ends up questioning itself over and over again, until the scientist dies, runs out of funding, or just gives up because academia is an inherently ungrateful and vicious place to be at.

So this just reinforces it, right? Doing science is questioning science? But if you looked at this picture for more than two seconds, you can see that this circle has some things before it goes around to questioning itself again. Let's go through them one by one.important topics about science:

1. Doing science you first observe something. You can ask a multitude of questions, like why is this happening? Or rather how is this happening?
2. Then the second step (and sometimes this is the first step when you already know something exists), this is when the googling happens. You gather previous evidence, observations and existing explanations for the thing you saw. You don't just use regular google though, you have to use a specific search engine designed for peer-reviewed stuff (that is checked by non-associated scientists for its truthfulness), and yes, even contradictory things.
3. The next step is an important one. This is when you form a hypothesis, a theory of why those things you observed are happening. Put a pin in this one. But this isn't enough.
4. You need to prove it to be true. You have to design experiments that test it, fairly(!) analyze the data you got, and then (just then, when you are sure), you report your findings based on the evidence. What constitutes as good science relies on lots of factors and it can fail at every single step. You could be asking the wrong question and not find anything. You can misinterpret previous literature either by accident or on purpose.
5. And lastly, you can mess up your experiments so that the data you get isn't real, or worse (and unfortunately this happens as well because people suck), you can even falsify your data to fit a given narrative.

Let's go back to that pinned point : important topics about science

forming a hypothesis. See, this is where most junk science fails, they don't base their hypotheses on existing evidence and observations, but rather they start off with a hypothesis and then cherry-pick or falsify the evidence based on what fits their initial theory. You've heard the flat earthers, right?

The movie "Behind the Curve" is a documentary that goes deep into the world of people who believe that the earth is flat. They are the favourite subject of ridicule when it comes to science denial because at the baseline, it is pretty harmless.

They don't endanger their children and the public by denying vaccines that have been proven to be safe countless times, and they don't risk our whole planet basically burning to ashes because of climate change.

The documentary attempts to explain why some people go against every inch of reason to follow something so ridiculous and easy to disprove. The most interesting part in my opinion when they explain how flat earthers basically go the other way around when it comes to science

their hypothesis, that the earth is flat doesn't come from evidence, but the other way around. They gather evidence specifically to fit their narrative and discard everything that doesn't. Confirmation bias is a known phenomenon where we often unknowingly look for data that agrees with our views. We are all guilty of this and the best we can do is to be aware and try to avoid it.

important topics about science: I have to say though, sometimes flat earthers do a surprisingly impressive job at designing experiments! At one point in the movie, some of them decide to measure the earth's rotation themselves. If it's actually turning, that means 360 divided by 24, so 15 degrees an hour, which they would be able to measure.

A gyroscope is a good tool to see this since if it's mounted somewhere on the globe, it is going to drift a bit - precisely 15 degrees per hour. A ring laser gyroscope is a type of tool they use for navigation systems. It is extremely precise and in theory able to show this 15-degree rotation they are looking for.

So they purchased one for 20 000 dollars, turned it on and what do you know, it showed exactly what it should have. Not surprisingly they weren't willing to accept this and looked for ways to disprove the data they got. Note here, this is great! Good science is all about trying to disprove yourself, you should be your worst enemy when it comes to research.

The problem is that they are not trying to disprove themselves or their theory, but rather the evidence itself. They are not stuck at googling stuff, they go above and beyond to prove their theory but it still falls flat (pun intended) because they don't base it on empirical evidence, but rather a personal belief and the evidence serves to support that belief.

This argument can't be made for most science deniers, so for example anti-vaxx people never moved past google and their evidence of - for example - "vaccines cause autism" is circumstantial at most.

The MMR vaccine is administered to children at the age around which they usually diagnose autism, so what they see can be merely a coincidence and large studies with thousands of children found no link. But that doesn't concern them, they've already made up their minds.

I am not saying this is strictly the only way to do science. Obviously it can be different between branches, but I'm a biologist, so i use examples related to that. What I'm trying to do is highlight the fact that many things contribute to doing science and that there are many ways to make mistakes along the way.stay with important topics about science.

As the Mythbusters famously said: failure is always an option: important topics about science

and it's not just a joke, that's actually really the cornerstone of our approach to the scientific method. So to answer the initial question - is questioning science how you do science? Well, mostly no. You have to ask questions, but most of the time it's about asking questions that have not been answered.

Some scientific theories, like the theory of gravity have been tested and confirmed so many times that there isn't much left to question about them. To science deniers, science is an authority and somewhere they learned to distrust all authority without exceptions.

important topics about science: Sometimes though, new knowledge can lead us to question what we thought we already knew - and that brings us to our next topic. The fact that things changed in the past is not a call to dismiss anything with the claim that "science can change" and that you shouldn't trust it.

At this point in time, most of what we know is true, verified using methods that are easy to replicate in labs. For multiple researchers to have come up with the same erroneous results and drawn the same false conclusions from them would require many, many things to independently go wrong over a long period of time.

The odds of this happening are so vanishingly improbable that it is almost impossible in some cases.  I won't even entertain the conspiracy argument here. Yes. I get paid ginormous amounts of money as a PhD student to shut my piehole.

the reason I don't spend it is that I don't really like the feel of paper in my hands and I flush all the cash I have down the toilet. Based on the second part of the video you could think science is something that just slowly progresses based on evidence in a steady motion. And this was the general belief about science before Thomas Kuhn published his landmark book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in 1962.

He claimed that science progresses episodically, normal science, characterised by steady growth, and revolutionary science, that causes a huge shift in our understanding. He also said that these revolutionary changes or "paradigm shifts" aren't necessarily caused by evidence but he rather based it on sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise.

important topics about science: In short, change happens when people decide to implement it and not when evidence emerges. This made lots of scientists really angry. You see, some scientists have an emotional connection to their findings without realizing it and bringing this fact up can cause an uproar as it did in this case.

Which is... Not great, if you spend as much time on the good ol' internet as I do, then you know that people who claim to be separated from emotions and say they operate on FACTS AND LOGIC are the ones who are the most susceptible to basing their beliefs on emotions instead of facts.

You know, because they managed to convince themselves that emotions don't affect them. Probably due to this, there's a saying that science progresses from funeral to funeral. That when a big name in science dies, that usually gives room for others to pursue different ideas. stay with important topics about science.

a paradigm shift: important topics about science

important topics about science: It's the moment when a big change is acknowledged. Probably the best example is Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", wherein he described his idea of evolution.

The book was a great success. Darwin was already a well-known and highly regarded scientist, but at that time research and the Church of England were closely linked and darwin's theory clashed with what the church espoused. It took a good 20-30 years until people widely accepted his theory as true.

We have to sidetrack here a bit. There seems to be a contradiction which I assume you've already noticed. This is what science denialists point out all the time. If science is based on facts and is true, how come it changes constantly?

This is a flawed argument because the truth and progress don't cancel each other out. I like to think of science as something that has many layers. There is the fundamental knowledge that runs deep and serves as a basis for everything, while things above this core layer can change but even that won't necessarily change the facts we already had before.

important topics about science: They amend to them. And taken together, they might shift our understanding overall. You see, before you cut into the apple you have a reason to believe the inside is also red. But even after you learn that it is not, the outside remains red.

We can take the central dogma of molecular biology as another example. Everyone who learned very basic biology has heard about this, and if you can't remember, then you most likely forgot, but it's okay, I will explain anyway. It can be summarized as this: it's the way the genetic information is used to create functioning things.

DNA to RNA to protein, plus some other paths that are a bit more special and not as common, the original one showed only the generic path that was later amended with more, but the very basic concept didn't change.

This understanding is what allowed the PCR method you hear a lot about these days to be developed, how we know the mRNA vaccine works, and how we are able to manufacture insulin (which is a protein) using bacteria. The information we have gets expanded.

We might learn new ways we didn't know existed, but that does not change what was true before. Questioning things doesn't necessarily mean questioning the truthfulness of a fact, it usually means questioning the exclusivity of it. Oh and about facts! They trained me well.

important topics about science: It hurts to say things in a way that would imply anything I say is written in stone. All those times you see a scientist talk about something they will always throw in a "to the best of our knowledge" or "at this time" or "as far as we know" or any other kind of bullshit-sounding sentence. Infuriating, right?

Well, wrong! I somewhat understand how hard it must be to take this seriously when even journalists try to push scientists into saying something is a 100%, and we simply won't say that.

There is the saying only two things are for certain in life - death and taxes: important topics about science

although I could argue with the absolute certainty of both. Really, nothing is a 100% in life. Statistically speaking. we know the sun will rise tomorrow, but there is still a very little chance a huge comet will hit earth and move it out of orbit.

Very, very, very unlikely, but this is what it means to be certain in science and language adapts to that. If you haven't seen the movie "Don't look up" I suggest you watch it, it's amazing and it hits the nail exactly on the head on how science denial works.

important topics about science: There's a scene in the Oval Office where politicians dismiss the danger of the comet hurling towards earth because Kate Dibiaski and Dr. Randall Mindy refused to state the collision is a hundred percent certainty, when in fact it is 99.7%. Because every calculation has a margin of error and they don't like to dismiss that.

99.7 percent is still overwhelming evidence. So i'm just going to say this because this subject tends to get on my nerves quite easily: if there is a 99.7 percent chance for something and the 0.3 against it, you have to be really stupid to focus on the 0.3 percent.

It's like saying there is a 99% chance that I will die if I jump off this 20-story building, but a 1% chance that I will survive. There is a chance, so I'm going to jump. Scientists take this very seriously and refuse to say something is true without a doubt. It's the small thing that makes all the difference between being sceptical and being in denial.

When there is overwhelming evidence pointing towards something, they will act based on those and still explore to learn more. That's what the 0.3% chance is for. There is a way to advocate these things without compromising scientific integrity.

important topics about science: Maybe you can compare it to something: I am as sure the climate is changing due to the actions of humanity, as I am sure I will not get eaten by a feral rat as I step outside of my apartment. I realize this won't help convince New Yorkers though.

I tried to explain everything as thoroughly as I could, what science is, how it works, what it means to question it legitimately and when it's not appropriate to do so.

Science denial is a huge problem these days and the media is perfectly capable of misrepresenting information which can be quite damaging and lots of scientists are stuck at communicating in a way that doesn't always come across as knowing what they are talking about, or the opposite, knowing too much and not realizing the limits of the public.

I fear of being guilty of either of these at some point. There is a huge gap between the scientific world and the general public and we should all work on closing that gap because it would be of interest to all of us. you can read more about important topics about science Here. you can also watch more about important topics about science: