Question: How do you want people to see science? What do you want them to think of it?

Susan Cartwright answered on 14 Jun 2015:

I think the most important thing about science is that it is a way of thinking, not (just) a body of knowledge. It is true that if you want to be a scientist you need to acquire a body of knowledge, so you can ask the right questions and assess the evidence, but it’s still the way of thinking that makes something science.

The key question in science is always “What is the evidence?” So, when my colleagues down the corridor helped discover the Higgs boson, they needed to ask themselves:
– Is what we are seeing real, or could it be just an accidental effect? (If I toss a coin 3 times and get 3 heads, that could be an accident: it’s not proof that the coin has two heads, or has been weighted so that it will always land heads. However, if I toss a coin 10 times and get 10 heads, I’m entitled to demand a look at the other side!)
– Are we sure that there is no background effect that could produce a fake signal? (My colleagues were working on the Higgs decay into two photons. The LHC produces many photons from processes not involving Higgs bosons. My colleagues had to be sure that there was no accidental effect – for example, some feature of the detector – that would cause a bump to appear in the two-photon mass distribution.)
– Is the object we are seeing the Higgs boson, or is it some other new particle? (The properties of the Higgs are predicted by theory. The object that was being produced had the “right” properties to be the Higgs, although it took a while after the initial discovery for the confidence to rise enough for “Higgs-like” to become “Higgs”!)
A crucial part of science is that you are expected to be critical of your own work: “are there any mistakes we could have made that could produce an artificial signal?” You are also expected to provide enough detail of what you did that someone else could replicate your work – this is not like the “secret ingredients” of Coca-Cola or Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you are secretive about how you did it, other scientists are entitled to distrust your results. A discovery is only really confidently believed when a different group has confirmed it: the key point about the Higgs discovery was that the results of two independent experiments – ATLAS and CMS – agreed with each other, and indeed within each experiment two independent searches (Higgs to two photons, and Higgs to four leptons) agreed with each other.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think many non-scientists see scientists as arrogant, and I think that’s unfair. In nearly all cases, by the time a result has got to the point where it’s being released to the public, it has been checked and rechecked to the point where everyone involved in the result is very confident that it’s right. This confidence may come over as arrogance, especially when the reasons for the confidence are very technical and hard to explain to anyone outside the field. But in fact, if you are genuinely arrogant about your work, you’ll be too full of yourself to check it properly, and sooner or later it’s all going to go horribly wrong.

Another point is that most scientists do what they do because they love it. People with a good science degree can usually earn more in industry or commerce than they do in university research: they aren’t in it for the money. Although I’m not a climate scientist, I get very cross when people claim that climate scientists support the idea of global warming because they get more grant money if they do – it’s not true (it is in the interests of most of the funders of such research, e.g. governments and industry, to pretend that it isn’t happening, and until the evidence became overwhelming, claims of anthropogenic climate change certainly did not make the claimants popular with their funding bodies), and it would require a conspiracy of monumental proportions to make it work (grant proposals are scrutinised by many bodies, including scientists in different fields who have no particular reason to be biased). Based on my experience of scientific collaborations, I simply don’t think this could be carried through – herding cats has nothing on trying to organise scientists, even if it’s only for a departmental meeting.

I also wish that people would understand the scientific sense of the word “theory”. A scientific theory is a mathematical framework which describes and predicts phenomena, and at least some of whose predictions have been tested and verified by observation or experiment. It’s not simply a wild idea dreamed up down the pub. Generally, such a framework doesn’t get to be called a theory unless it has demonstrated some explanatory power: it makes some part of nature make sense (such as why gases expand when heated, or why the atomic weights of the elements tend to be close to, but slightly less than, multiples of the mass of the hydrogen atom). The phrase “it’s only a theory” doesn’t make sense in the scientific world: a theory is really hard to develop (“it’s only a hypothesis” or “it’s only a conjecture” make more sense – “hypothesis” usually refers to a new theoretical framework without much experimental backing, and “conjecture” is the mathematical equivalent – an idea which seems to fit observations, but has not been formally proved).

One or two other random thoughts: scientists are human beings like anyone else (I was totally mystified by people who honestly thought there was a chance that the LHC would destroy the Earth – particle physicists are no more suicidal than any other profession: if we thought there was any such danger, we wouldn’t have turned the thing on!) – they do make mistakes, and often they’re humanly reluctant to admit them, but that doesn’t mean that every result that subsequently turns out to be wrong was a conspiracy to defraud or deceive (a few are: every profession has a few dodgy practitioners, and again science is no exception). Because it’s possible to have a successful career without a great deal of interpersonal interaction, it is probably true that science does attract more than its fair share of individuals with poor social skills (Paul Dirac is an example), but most scientists are just like everyone else, except maybe with a bit more tendency to be critical of what they read in the papers! Also, although I’ve talked about “science” and “scientists” here, it helps to remember that science is a collection of disciplines with a common approach, not a monolithic entity: “scientists say that…” is really a bit meaningless (you can trust me on the properties of the Higgs boson, but when it comes to the identification of dinosaur bones or the efficacy of paracetamol in pain relief for arthritis I am no more trustworthy than anyone else).