Stuart Firestein is the author of “It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.”
John Maddox, the longtime editor of Nature, was once asked how much of what the international scientific journal published turned out to be wrong. His reply: “All of it.”
Nature’s articles weren’t wrong, of course — just incomplete. There is always more to be learned, more to be discovered, a more sophisticated explanation to be had.
If you are worried about the world’s uncertainties, science has an answer for your anxiety. In fact, uncertainty is an essential part of science. It is what makes science the most powerful system for accumulating knowledge that humanity has ever devised. In science, revision is a victory.
This is not the science that you were taught in school, where there was a single right answer to every question on the test. But it is the real practice of science.
There is a tendency to ask: “How can uncertainty lead to knowledge?” But that’s the wrong question. Uncertainty is knowledge. To make progress, scientists depend on the fact that there is always the potential to improve existing knowledge, and they know that any scientific finding — no matter how powerful — can be refined. This is the nature of the scientific method, the process by which scientists collect data and test their hypotheses. In fact, a good scientific finding always acknowledges its limitations — which then point to what needs future investigation. Understanding and appreciating uncertainty for the possibilities it presents, in other words, are the keys to successful science.
If the world’s uncertainties are raising your blood pressure, you are in luck: You can take one of nine different classes of medication for hypertension, each working through a distinct pathway — despite the fact that scientists are still uncertain what regulates blood pressure in the first place. Roughly 90 percent of hypertension diagnoses are idiopathic, meaning a doctor cannot identify its root cause. Yet, here as elsewhere, imperfect knowledge means the potential for progress: Better drugs, or alternatives to drugs, may emerge as understanding improves. In the meantime, these medications have already prevented millions of premature deaths since their introduction 50 years ago.
Everyone benefits from scientific advances. I cannot imagine that anyone would prefer to be sick 25 years ago rather than today. Yes, some scientific progress has produced unintended, or even regrettable, consequences: The chemistry behind anesthetics advanced from research on the atomic bomb. But either way, it is not so much the shiny products of progress that have had the greatest effect. It is the idea of progress, which has altered how human beings see the world.
It is easy to assume that the idea of progress has existed since humans painted pictures on cave walls, but this is not the case. The ancient Greeks, despite all their extraordinary advances, did not have such a concept of progress — and insofar as they did, it was deemed negative, a source of dissolution and discord. Consider the fates of Icarus and Prometheus. While most citizens of advanced civilizations in the ancient world considered themselves better off than their forebears, they generally also believed that they had reached a sort of pinnacle. They recognized progress from, whereas people today think of progress to. The distinction is the difference between resignation — this is the best of all possible worlds, and it could get no better — and the view that things could be otherwise.
Paradoxically, rapid progress creates more uncertainty. Each advance in knowledge reveals new questions. The more you learn, the more you recognize how much there is to discover, how complex the world is and how there may be more than one solution to a given problem. As with blood pressure, science can make remarkable progress while nonetheless abiding uncertainty. The field of quantum physics, for instance, relies on what is called the uncertainty principle.
Asking science to be definitive is making the wrong demand. Science gives the best answer, or answers, available — not the final word, but a provisional answer, with some indication of how dependable it is.
Not only is certainty impossible, it is not even desirable. Imagine a world governed by laws that guaranteed certainty in every outcome. What would happen to imagination, discovery, adventure, romance, surprise — all the things that make life interesting? Gone into the maw of immutable laws and absolute certainty.
Uncertainty in the practice of science is optimistic. Yes, optimistic: the optimism of possibility, of being able to imagine that things could be otherwise. Don’t wait around for the final answer that will never come. Take your blood pressure medicine. Act on the nearly correct science we have now.
Unsettled science is not unsound science. It is the real science.
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