Seek ye truth?

Some days the world seems to run from one confrontation to another, from small ones in families or between kids in a playground, to large ones between countries or political parties or religions. And being human, we all wish to believe that the things we each believe are true, not just in our view but in some objective sense. And that in turn encourages us to try to convince people that we are right and they are wrong. After all, if we believe that, how can we in good conscience not try to help them see the light. But we don't usually dwell on these differences, or if we must actively disagree, we try to do so in polite terms. Since these things tend to push us apart, we either live in a sort of emotional pressure cooker, we grow a shell or we consort only with others of like mind.

From this point of view, there seems to be only one unequivocal bright spot -- science. Through the tools of science, we claim to know (more) objective truth. The scientific method is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. Moreover, it may the only domain of beliefs open in principle to all people, whatever their individual backgrounds, inclinations or opinions. The general support for this standard rests on the practice of experimentation, which requires us to confirm our beliefs -- that is, show them to be true -- by continually subjecting them to tests in which the only acceptable score is "perfect."

Can we really put this much of our faith in science? Is this the way to truth? Maybe Not.

The philosopher Karl Popper, in putting forward this idea thereby gave science the narrowest possible interpretation, shifting attention from the real acts of genius - new and powerful ideas generated by creative minds - to the mechanical process of showing that they have not yet been disproven. But those tests (experiments) may simply show that we may simply be unable to invent experiments that are powerful enough to disprove a given proposition.

Science has always had to deal with experiments that did not produce the expected results. Indeed, that is its real core. Experiments that simply confirm theory are much less important. In drug testing, for example, efficacy and safety trials need to be elaborate precisely because we do not have an adequate hypothesis to explain the link between a drug and a possible result. Double-blind, randomized trials to “prove” a proposition serve as a substitute when we cannot design a true experiment.

But the problem is not in the experimental method; rather, it is usually in the lack of a sufficiently powerful theory linking actions to effects. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “We do not know what we do not know.” Einstein’s cosmological theories were towering intellectual achievements not based on new experiments but on a new way to explain existing data and experience. Even today, when we have tested and confirmed many implications of those theories, the core implications may never be able to be tested.

Science is always a work in progress, but at its core is the process of creating and testing hypotheses. The great successes of science have been driven not by a failure of experiments, but by a failure of existing theories to explain the observed results. Science is not about the world; it is about our beliefs about the world. "The truth" is still elusive.