Self-Correcting Science

Science's core robustness is the fact that its practice is self-correcting. We humans are imperfect in many ways, so our ideas and opinions are usually off target or often simply wrong. Even when we try to be accurate, our incomplete knowledge prevents us from hitting the nail on the head and so we manage to bend more than a few nails in our attempts to comprehend our world.

Unfortunately, many of our mistaken human ideas and explanations can quickly get cast in concrete and so our errors persist through time. Rigid institutions like governments and some religions tend to cling to their fallacious views—often digging in their ideological heels and persisting in their beliefs, long after overwhelming evidence proves them wrong.

The scientific process is quite different. Scientists are no less likely to be mistaken than any other human, but they operate in a manner that is very effective at highlighting misunderstandings and subsequently rectifying them. Part of the self-correcting process is due to having scientific cohorts looking over one's shoulder and spotting errors. Scientists are often quite eager to identify inaccuracies in their colleagues.

Another crucial part of the self-correcting process is the manner in which scientific statements are presented: they must be framed in such a way that other scientists can easily put them to the test. And testing is what science is all about. If a scientific proposition cannot be evaluated by experiment, it's pretty much regarded as useless.

Thus science has relentlessly and steadily advanced toward improved knowledge and truth, as teams of scientists check each other and collaborate. The differing perspectives of individual scientists can create an ongoing dialog that counteracts both the propensity for one person to become overly attached to their pet idea or allowing the stature of any one individual to dominate and thus override opposing views.

Sometimes, however, we are presented with an example of science's self-correcting process in the form of just one individual acting alone—a special person who comes to an insight pretty much on their own. It calls for that individual to be both persistent and honest. Einstein was such a person. He wrestled pretty much alone for years with the conundrum of conflicting perspectives—and after a decade or more of mostly isolated contemplation, arrived at his startling conclusions about relativity.

Another favorite of mine is Johannes Kepler—born in 16^th century Germany. Surmounting numerous obstacles that threatened to confine him to a destitute life of poverty and ill health, Kepler eventually arrived at the truth of the orbital properties of our solar system's planets. Through a fortunate series of circumstances, he found himself able to put attention for three decades to the dynamics of planetary motion. Humanity—but especially Newton and other scientists who followed him—took a giant step forward in discovering the truth about how planets orbit the sun...thanks to Kepler.

What I find fascinating about Kepler is that he entered his 30-year struggle with wrong ideas. He had had a revelation that God had planned our planetary system such that the planets all obeyed simple and elegant mathematical interdependencies that were patterned after relationships between such perfect geometric shapes as spheres, cubes, and pyramids. He took his ideas even further by coming to believe that the planets' orbits were related to each other in the manner of musical harmonic intervals. These notions were so compelling to him because it was so elegant, and seemed to him to be so close to the truth.

For over 30 years Kepler pursued his revelation, trying to prove that his ideas were true—that it was all God's sublime plan. Yet he was wrong. The planet's orbits do not relate to each other in any such perfect harmonic or geometric ways. The beauty of it was that Kepler was a scientist. He possessed an integrity and a tenacity that kept him going for all those years; slowly revising his theories. Because he adhered to the self-correcting scientific process, he gradually let go of his erroneous thinking and arrived at the truth of planetary behavior. He discovered three elegant laws of planetary motion that proved to be far more profound than his earlier harmonic image. His work was so beautiful and genuine that Newton could come along a few years later and formulate his theory of universal gravity, which took our understanding to the next level, and the next step toward the truth of planetary motion.