BAN #339: Just so science

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Subscribing to this newsletter has been shown to be evidence-based

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

Monday 5 July, 2021: Hubble on the Bubble: Can NASA fix the world’s most famous telescope?

Tuesday 6 July, 2021: Drying up a claim — maybe — of liquid water under the south pole of Mars

Wednesday 7 July, 2021: This star cluster is slowly being taken over by black holes. In a billion years they’ll kill it.

Thursday 8 July, 2021: What caused an old, giant star to disappear for over half a year?

Friday 9 July, 2021: When the Universe makes no sense, look at a pretty galaxy

Random Thoughts

Stuff I think about in the shower, typically

I have A Thought About Science I’d like to share.

If you don’t understand or are familiar with the behind-the-scenes work done to make a declarative scientific statement — like, “The Universe is expanding”, or “Masks help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus” — it’s easy to think of science as a “just-so story”, one that makes up an explanation out of thin air with little evidence. Just-so stories are tales that have fanciful and sometimes obviously ridiculous explanations of things, and are usually difficult to falsify.

I had a children’s version of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories” when I was a kid, and I loved it. He made up silly stories about how the leopard got its spots and why whales have narrow throats to tell his daughter at bedtime. As I understand it, they’re called “just so” stories because his daughter demanded he tell them exactly the same way every time — they had to be just so.

But there’s another way to interpret the phrase: A person explains why something is the way it is, and when the other person asks why, the first person says it’s just so: That’s just the way it is so stop asking why.

That’s the interpretation I mean when I wonder about how people see science. They think scientists make all this stuff up, and when asked for details, scientists say it’s just so.

But that’s not the case (well, not usually; sometimes the details are complex and it takes a life’s worth of education and practice to understand them, and the medium hosting the discussion (like Twitter) doesn’t allow for nuance). In fact, science is the opposite of that!

When faced with a puzzle that needs figuring out, the scientist doesn’t come up with something out of whole cloth and then closes the matter; instead, one or more tentative ideas are considered, and then — and this part is critical, just absolutely the basis of the whole process — it’s tested to see if it make sense, to see if the explanation holds together, to see if it fits the data or not. If it doesn’t work, it’s tossed out.

And even if it does fit that doesn’t mean it’s right, so the scientist has to do further testing, has to ask, “Well, if this works here, will it work elsewhere? Is there something I’m missing? Is there something that fits better? And if this is the right idea, what else does that imply?”

Science isn’t a “just-so” story. It’s an “If so” story. If this is so, then what? Why? What’s next? What else is going on? What are the ramifications? How might this be wrong in some way I haven’t seen?

When a scientists makes a statement on Twitter — “The Earth is warming up, and it’s our fault” — that’s not something they made up on the spot for convenience. That’s the smallest tip of a vast mountain of data, evidence, math, modeling, experimentation, and millions of human-hours of work trying to figure out why things happen the way they do.

Science isn’t a declarative statement. It’s the immense work that went into being able to say it.

In a just-so story the explanation is the end of the process. In science, it’s the beginning.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!