This morning I was listening to NPR's Science Friday. (Yes, I know it is Saturday, but the NPR stream has a habit of replaying stuff from the day before.) They were broadcasting an interesting discussion from the campus of Arizona State University. It was on cosmology, the insights that the Large Hadron Collider will provide into the structure of matter, and the connections between the two. The full program can be heard here.
But fear not, this is not a post about the science of that discussion. There is another whole blog for that. What I found particularly interesting was a little passage in the discussion (about 20-30 mins. in) where the scientists (Steven Weinberg and Brian Greene among them) were saying that the really exciting thing would be if the LHC found results that were completely at odds with our present understanding of nature–in particular, if it found no Higgs Boson whatsoever. Now for the purposes of this post you don't need to know what a Higgs Boson is, but the existence of at least one Higgs Boson is a basic property of almost all models of particle physics. So if the LHC doesn't find one it means there is something deep we do not understand about the way the universe works.
For scientists that is quite exciting, but I think it creates a credibility gap if you tell the world you are building a multi-billion-dollar (or worse, multi-billion-euro) machine to find something, and then you don't find it. To turn around and then be like: "Oh yeah, we did say we'd find that, didn't we? But don't you understand? It's even better that we didn't find it." sounds naive at best and disingenuous at worst.
But this is where particle physics is right now. They have created a sales pitch for the LHC in the scientific community where it is "Heads we win, tails we win even bigger". Smart people, those particle physicists. If perhaps, a little politically naive at times.
Which is where the "Science Friday" discussion then went, and got even better. Ira Flatow (the host) indeed pointed out that the "It's even better that we didn't find it" line might create certain problems with science funding agencies (and, by implication, the tax-payer). If you got money to build a big particle collider because you said you'd discover a particular particle, and then it turned out you were wrong and that particle didn't exist, you might think that minimally this would create problems when you went back to ask for more money. So one of the guests (Lawrence Krauss I think) started talking about how this was because the public did not really get the scientific process, and not understanding something was the happiest time for a scientist–or at least a theoretical scientist. Because that's what really "gets scientists' juices flowing".
Which I think is at least half true. The best time for me is when understanding is just dawning, and you are starting to see how the new idea you just had makes everything you didn't understand before fit together. But regardless, there needs to be a point where you are confused in order for the resolution to be exciting, and the point where you actually have everything worked out and in a neat little package is not the exciting part. Maybe satisfying (especially for those of us who like closure!) but not particularly exciting.
So yes, that is certainly something that a lot of people do not realize about science. Science is about pushing on problems we don't know much about. So it is often quite uncertain what we will find. Hence the vigorous discussion of whether the LHC really will find the Higgs Boson. (An amusing, but more technical, take on this debate can be found here.)
But I submit that a lot of science's cultural clout comes from the appearance of certainty it gives. "Science has shown", "It's a scientific fact", and so on are phrases designed to end all debate. At least in the middle of last century, the scientist (usually in a white lab. coat) was a figure of authority, since he (and it almost always was he) spoke from a position of rational, irrefutable knowledge that could not be gainsaid because it had been obtained, well, scientifically.
Concomitantly, the fact that science, and in particular physics, is very well funded by the government compared to other areas of intellectual inquiry seems to me a consequence of science's ability to say "We understand X and because of that we can make Y". We did it with the nucleus and atom bombs. We did it with transistors and computers. So the government keeps giving us lots of research $ so we can keep doing it. If we said "We don't understand X, but we'd really really like to understand X, please give us money" do you think the rest of society would still be so generous–should still be so generous–with the dosh?
I submit that this is the Faustian bargain physicists have made. Most of us are not in the game to take something we understand and build a device. That's for engineers! We are in it for the stage that comes before that. The stage where you don't understand X and would like to understand X. And particularly when you are just beginning to glimpse an understanding of something you have been struggling to understand for weeks, or for years: that's when it's exciting. But when you're just getting that glimpse you may well be wrong. So you shouldn't pretend that you're certain of something you're not certain of. Which, I suppose, means that all this debate about what the LHC will find is healthy.
But it also means you can't have your funding-cake and eat it too. Sure, understanding the universe is important. But philosophers (and theologians, and historians, and sociolgists....) want to understand the universe too. If it's just about struggling for understanding and seeking truth then why are we funded so much better than they?
So I'm not sure, friend Lawrence, that you WANT the public to understand what "really gets scientists' juices going". And that the scientific process is messy and takes to time to arrive at settled results, often reaching only contingent "truths" along the way. Because, maybe your Origins Initiative at ASU would not be nearly so well funded if they did.
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