Science makes mistakes, big ones. This doesn't tie in with how it is conveyed in the media nor taught in schools and universities throughout the world. Instead, it is presented as fundamental truths that should be absorbed much as religious dogma is. Not only does this do our educational establishment a disservice but it also acts to the detriment of science itself. Scientists perversely know quite well that the field progresses on the basis of crisis and victory. It is inbuilt in the scientific method and to deny the possibility of errors also impedes progress. We make mistakes, we are human that does not tarnish science it makes it more dynamic and strangely more engaging.
Being taught physics at University I found the most interesting part was the discovery that science did not know it all. Einstein for all his great genius failed to solve the Unified Field Theory. He like others wanted an explanation for all the forces (electromagnetic, gravitational, weak and strong forces) that would simply cut to the fundamental truth that they were actually the same force. Hints in that view abounded. Take the electrostatic force between two charges Q1 and Q2 the formula looks like this.
Where F is the electrostatic force and Q1 and Q2 are the charges and k is a constant, and r is the distance between the charges. Then compare it to gravity’s force between two masses.
Here M1 and M2 represent two masses, G is the gravitational constant while r is the distance between the two masses. These two forces just look similar don't they? You almost feel there has to be some equation relating mass and charge which would explain both of these in a single formula. Einstein got a heck of a lot further than most and found the relationship between energy and mass ( and c the speed of light) with his famous
.
This was an important milestone and recent discoveries in the world of physics seem to back up yet another of Einstein's beautiful predictions. The fact that 100 years later experimental physics is eventually coming up to speed with his theoretical and elegant equations is indeed breathtaking.
But we have been stunned before at the underlying beauty in science. When Einstein’s relativity is applied to the Maxwell’s equations as if by miracle you are able to describe electricity, magnetism, and light in one uniform system. Lorentz transformations of Maxwell’s equations is startling in its beauty. You feel not only as a scientist its elegance emergence of truth but also as an artist surprised science and mathematics could manage such a masterpiece. It feels right, complete truth discovered. Illuminating and fascinating. Perhaps not everyone has the mathematical tools to appreciate this but they can still sense they are in the presence of a work of genius.
Having discovering a link between the forces between electrostatic charges and currents it seemed a similar link should exist between the four forces of physics. You sense that it is there. The fact that Einstein died trying to solve this puzzle just adds to its appeal. Sitting in the lecture theatre, having spent years day digesting the basic physics and tools, I felt the excitement of the hunt call to me, as something unfinished needing attention. This search for excellence felt like an awakening of sorts. The the excitement was tangible. Here was something we didn't yet know and the realisation too that here is what real science is all about.
Getting to that stage of inventiveness we have to go through a process of coming up to speed with important tools and knowledge. But education has prioritised such fundamentals at the cost to its real purpose and character. Ask any student studying physics and somewhere along the way usually the mundane wipes the floor of any desire of investigation. The closest they get is repeating scientific experiments done for generations. They don't have time to investigate further they must memorise and repeat and then carefully vomit up properly at exam time their digested fodder. Somewhere along the process the system cultivates not elegant beauty but bulimic effectiveness. Truths become secondary to results, grades, and publications. Our universities which should be centres of excellence have largely become devoid of the art of science but effective commercial science incubators. Those who churn out publications are admired and courted. Personal agendas dominate senates, meetings, departments, agendas and even fields to be studied. Stultifying real research they have become clones of the dairy herd. Effective in milk production but deformed until even walking normally is no longer viable. Look closely in departments throughout the country and you will see the same deformities afflict other fields. The beauty goes, the search becomes joyless. We have settled for soulless science when it was always so much much more.
Some decades ago a body was discovered in Düsseldorf Germany and was thought to be a French army officer who died during Napoleon’s campaign. It took years for him to be discovered as a Neanderthal. Mind you we have made mistakes like this before. In 1908 the remains of a Neanderthal was found inside western France. This was a nearly complete skeleton of a man who would've been elderly by Neanderthal standards. The bones were analysed and a description created of what Neanderthals look like which remains in common usage today. They were pronounced dull witted, brutish, ape-like creatures who walked hunched over with a shuffling gate. This was accepted for decades by paleoanthrologists. It also became the reason why we had so many popular images of stupid looking cavemen in cartoons and movies. The truth was this was a 40-year-old Neanderthal, an elderly man of those times, he was hunched over in posture because of severe arthritis in his spine. The bowing of his legs was probably from Ricketts disease in his childhood and he had lost most of his teeth and part of his jaw. In fact, Neanderthal man looked much more like us in appearance and intelligence than anyone suspected and probably exceeded us in physical strength. In fact some modern scientists begin to suspect a healthy Neanderthal could lift an average North American football player over his head and throw him through the goalposts!
In another well known mistake in carbon dating techniques, one expert had dated prehistoric human remains as 21,300 years old. Subsequently the “Bischof-Speyer” skelton was found to be a mere youth at 3,300 years old. Another error involved an allegedly prehistoric skull discovered near Paderhorn in 1976 and thought to be the oldest human remains ever found in the region. The skull was dated 27,400 years old. Recent research however indicates it belongs to an elderly man who died around 1750. Germany’s Herne Anthropology Museum which owned the Paderborn skull was so upset by the findings that it did its own tests. “We had the skull cut open and it still smelt,” the museum’s director Barbara Rushoff-Thale ,said last week “We are naturally very disappointed.” Such disappointment is not restricted to this field of research.
The earth receives radiation from the sun on its surface and a certain proportion is reflected back. We have very effective formula to try and describe this exchange. Strangely the earth is emitting too much energy for the story to be true. Some have speculated we may have a huge nuclear fission reactor deep inside the earth to explain the discrepancy. “According to high school science books at the centre of the earth there should be a liquid iron alloy core and a smaller solid inner core at the centre. For ten years, geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon has presented increasingly persuasive evidence that at the very centre of the Earth, within the inner core, there exists a five mile in diameter sphere of uranium which acts as a natural nuclear reactor.” The truth is we can suspect but as yet we simply don’t know. But doesn’t it make you want to find out?
We think of scientists as all knowing and incredibly smart. We can also be slightly intimidated by their cleverness. They are however humans like us and they make mistakes. The Mars climate orbiter was a satellite designed to collect data. It was launched in December 1998 and was due to arrive at the red planet later in the next year. On September 23, 1999 NASA announced the orbiter was lost. Investigation showed the disaster was due to a confusion in mathematical units. One team working on the spacecraft had used standard US measurements (like feet), while the other had used the metric system. That's why they lost the spacecraft. It's horrific that something so simple could could cost us $125 million dollars. Don’t you feel suddenly less stupid?
Hubble telescope’s main mirror was ground down too much (only by roughly 1/50 of the thickness of a human hair). Nevertheless this tiny error resulted in blurry images. The cost of repairing it entailed a trip to space and and a bill of $1.5 billion dollars.
The Ariane 5 rocket was designed by the European Space Agency to push Europe to the head of the space exploration industry. It's guidance system was running on the same computer code as it's slower predecessor Ariane 4. 36.7 seconds into the launch the guidance computer attempted to convert the sideways velocity of the rocket from a 64-bit ‘floating point’ format to 16-bit ‘signed integer’ format. However, with Ariane 5’s faster rocket the velocity generated a number too big to be represented by the 16-bit ‘signed integer’. As a result the nozzles of the two solid boosters swung out of position nearly detaching the boosters from the body of the rocket and triggering a self destruct mechanism. The rocket disintegrated 39 seconds into its maiden flight destroying several extremely expensive satellites in the process. This time the the bill came to $370- $500 million dollars.
For reasons I don't yet understand such facts make us more not less excited and interested in science. I expect it is because were all inherently curious and want to find out stuff. It appeals to that stage in childhood when we ask “why”, so often of our parents, about every single thing around us. That healthy curiosity get damped by education rather than enhanced. Somewhere along the way we stop asking because being told a lot of stuff is not as exciting. If you were told everything in a room there is a part of you that no longer is interested in going in there. We filled the room with staff, employed experts about tables, history and types of wood. Created courses in each nuance and failed to notice that our students have lost interest in this inventory. Even those involved in its conveyance have lost their joy and purpose. Because we focused on just how much we know and not on what we don’t, we managed to spoil the mystery of science. That's why we must celebrate the search and the questions, until students start asking “why” again. Until our education system produces people who get to do what they love our science will languish in the hands of the scientific illiterates who cannot appreciate the beauty to be found just out of our reach.
