Settled Science

Sitting in the basement with a head cold allows GG some time to wonder about science at a bit more removed distance, and such reflections are kind of encouraged as the year changes over. In the public sphere, science gets representing in many ways. “It is a process, not a collection of facts” shows up a fair bit. From the scientists’ side, it means that interpretations can change with new evidence, and there is a process of sorts for refining and improving our understanding of the universe, which can result in some “facts” changing. GG suspects a different interpretation from outside science is there, which is anything can be true. At the extreme, this produces a lot of “whataboutism” and “self-education” where people can do this science process stuff with the observations they trust more.

Now Richard Feynman years ago offered that “science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.” Arguably science is failing in a lot of corners these days as confirmation bias and avoidance of cognitive dissonance seems to permit a lot of fooling yourself. Jon Stewart once summarized questioning by a Congressman at a committee hearing as “I do not believe the scientists because it is their profession, not their hobby.” If the people actually working on the science produce results you don’t like, well, they must be dishonest as opposed to the noble hobbyists. Anyways, that kind of delusion isn’t really where GG wants to go today.

Let’s consider a more mainstream concern: So if science isn’t a collection of facts, just what does it mean to say “the science is settled”? Does this really happen? How might it work?

Science has been generously supported since WWII in the U.S. in large part because “blue sky” science laid out relationships and theories that in some instances were eminently useful. But for that to happen, you need the science to make it back to the broader population. In a sense, you want that component of the eventual product to be useful, and that probably needs the science to be settled.

GG’s grad school roommate was a postdoc in optical physics (a field which very much generated massive utility and money). He noted back then that Nobel Prizes were not simply for a discovery, but the discovery had to have led to important new work–it had to have proven useful by later work building upon it. This is then a conceptually simple way of viewing if science is settled: the more work relies on it and successfully can be verified against new observations, the more settled that science becomes. Furthermore, the more newer stuff that tests out successfully, the harder for some replacement theory to replace it as it would also have to lead to explaining the successful derivative work.

There are examples all across science. Newtonian physics is an instructive case: rules for forces and momentum and such not became the basis for much civil engineering to great success. Could Newton have been wrong? Well, not really, but the replacement with relativity left essentially undisturbed the formulae and relationships for everyday life; it was at the edges where experience and experimentation was absent or minimal where the two theories diverged. So in a sense, one way “settled science” could be overturned would actually be to correct its deficiencies on the relatively unexplored margins, where different conditions require a different theory.

So that isn’t blowing up settled science, more like adjusting it on the remote margins. Are there real revolutions where what seemed settled was really wrong?

Consider deformation of the Earth’s crust. For American geologists in the early twentieth century, the theory they employed to interpret their observations was (mainly) geosynclinal theory, a theory largely grown out of the Appalachians. Hundreds of studies noted where in the geosyncline a particular tract of geology fell, whether the miogeosyncline or the eugeosyncline. Complications arose, which led to the development of geanticlines that could split a miogeosyncline and so on. Would they have considered this theory to be “settled science”? Because if they did, they were quite wrong. Frankly, there was enough pig-headedness circulating that there certainly were individuals who would have asserted it to be so. But the fact that the European community was far more open to the mobilist argument of continental drift, probably even this widely-accepted concept would probably not have been termed as “settled science” at the time.

But instead of surveying the community, how about asking, how did geosynclinal theory get built upon? Frankly, GG is kind of stumped. While it provided a handy coatrack to hang new geologic observations on, it isn’t entirely clear that this framework then yielded the basis for new work. The fixist view would predict that nearby outcrops were always pretty nearby, but the differences in fauna separated by short distances was not a prediction and instead required a repair job (e.g., the geanticline). It predicted that thickening piles of sediment would, at some point, drive shortening and uplift focused near the miogeosyncline and the eugeosymcline boundary, but attempts to make a physical model of such an outcome usually required some other action (e.g., convection in the mantle) that often seemed quite ad hoc.

In contrast, how has plate tectonics done? It noted that stratovolcanoes were at places where oceanic plates descended into the mantle, providing the context that led to our modern understanding of volcanic origins from dewatering of the subducting slab. Where ocean floor was created suggested it would be hot and then cool, which led to application of a half-space cooling model that didi an excellent job of explaining the bathymetry of the oceans. Even something technically outside plate tectonics, like hot spot volcanism, made more sense as to why linear chains of volcanoes tended to get older the farther from the currently active volcano you looked. Things like seismic hazard and mineral deposits, geodetic changes in position, impacts of splitting species by rifting away continents… plate tectonics has done really, really well. And for a theory to replace it, that theory will have to also be capable of carrying these other achievements on its shoulders. So, as with Newtonian physics, any subsequent theory would probably be dealing with edges the current theory never really considered.

So, today, we have things like vaccinations that some say are still in doubt, that the science isn’t settled. GG is not a biologist or medical practitioner and gets queasy at the sight of blood, but it seems we’ve built quite a lot on the concepts underlying vaccination that have permitted the eradication of polio and (until recently) measles. There is far more in the medical literature that is built upon this, just as evolution has proven essential to understand the way that diseases like HIV and COVID change with time, and that these changes can actually be identified and the impact of those changes anticipated and incorporated into medical practice.

Is the science settled on global warming? Well, given the idea was put forward more than a century ago and we are still incorporating the basic observation that there are greenhouse gases to explain lots (at one level is, for instance, the difference in night time temperatures between deserts and forests), it sure seems like that is settled science. When we get into more specific predictions of, say, changes in precipitation or the absorption of heat by the oceans, things get more involved, but the basic science that some gases absorb radiation in a way that will lead to warming, that’s solid. Is there work in different directions built on that? We can see in ice cores the changes in CO2 and temperature and find the reasons for patterns in temperature and sun angle and CO2 all being tied together in ways not remotely clear without these understandings; the waxing and waning of global ie sheets in the past couple million years is well explained with that understanding. The massive glaciations of the late Paleozoic seem quite abundantly clear only if CO2 plays a major role in controlling surface temperatures over geologic time (the burial of massive amounts of carbon into rocks that became the coals that fired the industrial revolution was the means to cool the planet enough to create the large Permo-Carboniferous glaciation).

So GG would offer something of a test: if somebody thinks science is still in flux and undecided, see if there is a lot of work that builds successfully on that science. If it is there, the odds the science is wrong decline with the volume of successful work sitting atop it. If somebody states the science is settled, look for the same kind of structure relying on that science that is producing results that successfully mirror reality. In this way, you can avoid substituting yourself for experts in the field, a tendency that has grown quite large with the “educate yourself” crowd. To educate yourself, you first need to recognize how not to fool yourself.